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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24030088">Homemaking</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch'>SylvanWitch</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>James Bond (Craig movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Q (James Bond), Canon-Typical Violence, Domesticity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Genderqueer Character, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Misunderstandings, Oral Sex, Undercover as a Couple</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 01:49:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>42,901</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24030088</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Undercover as Bond's lover to root out a mole in MI-6, Q discovers that there is more to James Bond than sex and violence.  Unfortunately, Q ends up with far more experience of the one than the other as they find themselves out in the cold, unable to trust anyone from the home office, and relying only on each other to uncover the identity of their deadly opponent.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James Bond/Q</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>130</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>349</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>00Q</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Home away from Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This story began in mid-February 2020 as a fill for a "cozy cottage" personal tropes bingo card.  It was supposed to be a light-hearted little 00Q romance.  Three-and-a-half months and one terrifying pandemic later, it's something else entirely.  There is a lot of tension, angst, emotional trauma, and fear in this story, but it does have a happy ending.  I thought you should know that going in.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Q wouldn’t have considered Bond the domesticated type.</p><p>When he’d given a spare thought to what Bond was like in the privacy of his own home, Q’s mind had run to rather more vivid (and frustrating) visions—Bond entertaining a series of leggy, swollen-lipped supermodels in a vast, cool-sheeted bed beneath mood lighting that brought out the planes and shadows of his body.</p><p>It had never occurred to him that Bond at home was quite the different animal from the lethal instrument of destruction Her Majesty required of him in the world at large.</p><p>And that was a significant failure of reasoning on Q’s part.  After all, his own home was cluttered with books and gadgets and half-empty teacups, and when he stepped through its door, he shrugged off his coat and his work persona and relaxed into the man he was when none but a select few were looking.</p><p>The only time he’d ever seen Bond’s own professional façade crack had been during the Silva debacle, and Q had taken significant pains to forget the look of stark and gutting loss on Bond’s face in the footage that had been gathered immediately following the Incident.</p><p>Now, though, here, in the cozy highlands cottage that functioned as both their safe house and the headquarters from which they ran a covert counter-espionage effort to root out a mole in their own organization, Bond had surprised Q.</p><p>From the tatty wool cable-knit jumper he’d donned after his daily morning runs to the wellies he routinely wore out into the garden to gather fresh herbs for cooking dinner, Bond seemed thoroughly at home, as if it were old hat for him to take a holiday with his lover in a white-washed stone cottage near the shores of a loch that stretched blue-black and reflective at the feet of the mountains.</p><p>Q hadn’t objected to the pretense of a relationship.  Why else would two men spend so much time in close quarters without the acceptable barrier of hunting rifles and/or fishing rods?</p><p>He hadn’t objected to sharing the cottage’s only bed.</p><p>He hadn’t objected to Bond’s habit of saying, “Alright, love?” with the brief, warm press of a broad palm against the small of his back as Bond moved past him in the cottage’s limited spaces.</p><p>Q was a professional there to do a job.</p><p>James Bond’s skill with a roasted chicken and apparently magical ability at knowing when Q needed a fresh cuppa did not fluster him or woo him into dreamy-eyed inattention.</p><p>They had a job to do.  People were relying on them to do it.</p><p>But in the dark of night, when no one was the wiser, when Bond’s steady, deep breathing beside him told Q he was asleep, Q indulged himself in occasional fantasies.</p><p>He was, after all, not made of stone.</p><p>That he couldn’t do anything about those fantasies, that he had to keep his hand from straying down the waistband of his pajama bottoms, well, if Q were being honest—which he was, in this instance, because there was enough subterfuge in his life already, and this circumstance, anyway, called for manly forthrightness—that made it hotter.</p><p>It also meant that when Bond greeted him from the sinkboard with a cheery, “Sleep well?” Q could just manage to answer without blushing.</p><p>Shoving his hair back off his forehead, Q nodded and said, “Ta,” to the cup of perfectly prepared tea Bond offered and drank half of it without even wincing, despite its hotness.</p><p>“Now that’s a superpower,” Bond murmured, a warm smirk on his hard face as he returned to the work of pushing eggs around a skillet.</p><p>“Western alright?” he asked, though Q could see from the cubed veg and ham that Bond already had his answer.</p><p>Q said, “Fine,” and slid into a seat at the tiny, gleaming oak table in the corner, and spent a few minutes letting the caffeine in the tea work its way through his system.</p><p>When he was feeling human again, Q opened his laptop and began reading his ‘secure’ (read: compromised) emails, fielding a few planted ones from M and Moneypenny and Q’s second-in-command.</p><p>Those three were aware of Q’s actual business on this “vacation,” but even a diligent traitor wouldn’t have been able to tell from Moneypenny’s teasing questions about Q’s ‘boyfriend’ and M’s terse request for a second look at some line items in Q branch’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year that Q was anywhere but on holiday with the man in question, who was for their purposes an accountant from Swansea named Bryan who liked to garden and watch Swedish slow TV at the weekend.</p><p>To his second, a fiercely loyal, purple-haired lesbian named Judy, Q offered the usual reassurances about office management, two cautions regarding the workflow for the day, and a bit of advice about the coffee and tea caddy reorders.  (His office was partial to chocolate biscuits, so he always doubled the volume suggested by the main budget office, who were apparently made up of hair-shirt-wearing ascetics, judging by their idea of good nosh.)</p><p>A plate appeared at Q’s elbow as he was signing off of official email, and he dutifully closed the laptop and pushed it aside to give his attention to Bond’s breakfast efforts, which were, as with everything the man did, calculated to make a person feel that he had never lavished such attention on another human being.</p><p>It had taken Q three painful days to get used to the fact that this was just the way Bond worked: with a breathtaking, thoroughgoing competence in every detail. </p><p>Q supposed that was how Bond had stayed alive—more or less—for so long.</p><p>Even so, it was a bit daunting at first, notwithstanding Q’s own not insignificant skillset.  Despite the hasty judgements often made from his appearance, he was neither a waifish wallflower nor an awkward aesthete.</p><p>Q knew what he wanted and was quite capable of taking it.  In fact, it had been his penchant for going where he could but oughtn’t in search of information that didn’t belong to him that had captured the attention of the late, lamented M to begin with.  She’d seen in him something few others had and, with a wolfish smile, had coerced him into position to become what he now was.</p><p>Having read Bond’s file, Q knew that in this they shared something of a past:  Both troublemakers, both orphans out against the world, both destined to become loyal dogs at the heel of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.</p><p>If he ran to whippet rather than bulldog, it wasn’t his fault, and anyway, more the fool he who underestimated him.</p><p>Bond was no fool.</p><p>Despite the latent lethality in his every graceful movement, Bond deferred to Q, who was, after all, the lead on this mission.  Bond was there to keep Q safe and to offer his expertise in espionage, and he’d fallen into his cover role as doting older boyfriend as easily as he’d slipped into a routine of fitting into the spaces where Q needed him, whether that was making endless cups of tea or taking a prowl of the perimeter each night before bed.</p><p>And at no point did Bond so much as raise a salacious eyebrow in Q’s direction, which was frustrating on one level and something of a relief on another.</p><p>Q couldn’t afford to be distracted from their mission, for one thing, and for another, he wasn’t sure if a fling while on this faux romantic holiday would easily transplant to the hurly-burly of their more typical lives at the home office.</p><p>More pointedly, perhaps, was that Q didn’t know if he wanted a <em>fling</em>.</p><p>Oh, he wanted <em>Bond</em>, no question there.  His nighttime fantasies proved that quite thoroughly, thank you very much.  That Bond might be interested in reciprocating was apparent from his file, if not from his current behavior.</p><p>But Q had learned long ago that what he wanted wasn’t always best for him, and he had a sneaking, somewhat awful suspicion that what he wanted in this case wasn’t nearly so temporary as might be understood by the word ‘fling.’</p><p>In short, he was thoroughly buggered, but, alas, only figuratively speaking.</p><p>At least Bond was unaware of Q’s attraction for him.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Homewrecking</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Q?”</p><p>Q heard Bond’s voice just as he registered the sound of the front door closing.  As the approach of footsteps didn’t follow, Q emerged from the bedroom, where he’d been changing into clothes more suitable for the outdoors, and saw Bond still in his wellies on the mat in the tiny front hallway.</p><p>There was a damp, long-haired herding dog of some kind at Bond’s heel.</p><p>Give him a long rifle and a wicker basket, and he’d be indistinguishable from the locals, Q thought, taking in the raveled wool jumper Bond favored and the dog’s bright-eyed expression as it watched Q’s approach.</p><p>“Picked up a friend, I see,” Q remarked, and Bond glanced fondly at the dog.</p><p>“This is Hamish,” Bond said.  “Old Maggie’s dog.”</p><p>Bond said ‘Old Maggie’ as though she were a neighbor they’d long been familiar with, and Q had a moment of odd, skin-wrinkling premonition before a note in Bond’s voice warned him that they weren’t alone.</p><p>“Giles, Maggie’s son, came over with him,” which is when Q realized there was a man standing in the parlor off the front hall.</p><p>“Giles Gilchrist,” the man said before looming over Q to offer his enormous, chapped red hand for shaking. </p><p>Q wondered if his digits would come back intact, but he could hardly be rude and refuse the greeting.  “Quentin Cook,” he said, offering his cover identity.</p><p>“Giles wondered if we’d like to pop round the old croft for a wee dram after supper,” Bond explained in a Scots accent Q had never heard him use before.</p><p>“That would be lovely,” he answered.  It was almost a reflex to use his Eton accent in return, though, of course, he’d never attended that prestigious public school.</p><p>Giles’ grip seemed to weaken at that, as if he were afraid of damaging Q’s delicate sensibilities, and Q didn’t miss the speculative expression as his eyes drifted from Q to Bond and back again.</p><p>Well, that cover’s solid, anyway, Q thought sourly, disliking being pigeon-holed as weak and innocuous when he was at least as deadly as Bond, though in a less direct and immediate fashion.</p><p>Then he reminded himself that they were supposed to be lovers down from London for a bit of a cozy holiday, and he slapped on a simpering expression and sidled closer to Bond and Hamish, who pressed his cold, wet nose into Q’s hand even as Bond’s arm slid around his waist to pull him close.</p><p>He felt Bond’s lips against his hair as Bond whispered, “Relax,” into his ear.  Q told himself it was only Bond’s warm breath that made him shiver.</p><p>To his horror, he heard a breathy laugh emerge from his own mouth as he looked up—and up—at Giles.  “Bryan is always telling me I need to get out more,” he offered by way of confession, sealing his persona with a duck of his head.</p><p>Bond’s hand slid to his hip and brought him closer still, in reckless disregard of one of the more immoveable laws of physics.</p><p>“I’d keep him all to myself if I could,” Bond said.  Q caught his beaming smile out of the corner of his eye and felt his knees go a little weak before reminding himself sternly that this was all for show.</p><p>“I can see why,” Giles answered with an admiring leer that realigned Q’s apprehensions of the man.</p><p>“We’ll see you at seven, then?” Bond asked, stepping away from the door in order to open it, a clear signal that Giles and Hamish should depart, so Bond and his boyfriend could get on with their intimate holiday.</p><p>“Mother’ll be pleased,” Giles noted, taking the hint with another lewd look, this time at the both of them.</p><p>As soon as the door closed behind Giles, Q stepped out of Bond’s embrace and leveled a steely glare on him.</p><p>“What?” Bond asked innocently, shrugging as he stepped out of his boots and lined them up precisely in the boot tray, beside Q’s own.</p><p>“Why, exactly, are we going to the Gilchrists’ for after dinner drinks?” Q asked.</p><p>“Because Giles was insistent—”</p><p>“—and randy,” Q interrupted.</p><p>“And that,” Bond agreed, aiming a rakish eyebrow at him.</p><p>Q made a disgusted noise and shook his head.  “Only you could find a gay giant interested in a threesome in the wilds of Scotland,” he observed acidly.</p><p>Bond’s eyebrow lowered as he frowned.  “I didn’t go looking for the invitation,” he noted almost primly.  “And it would have seemed rude—not to mention suspicious—to turn him down flat.  We’re supposed to be vacationing, after all, not honeymooning.” </p><p>“Besides,” and Q really should have been warned what was coming next by the honeyed note that slipped into Bond’s voice, “I didn’t know you were the jealous sort, or I’d never have considered it.”</p><p>On an intellectual level, Q recognized Bond’s outrageous flirting for what it was—a ploy to throw Q off-guard, a bit of teasing for teasing’s sake.</p><p>Emotionally, however, an icy wave sloshed through his guts as he considered the possibility that Bond knew the wholly inappropriate feelings Q had been struggling with during the entirety of the mission and was, at last, acknowledging them.</p><p>The war between head and heart left him stunned and gaping for seconds longer than he could gracefully account for, and as Bond’s expression morphed from ribald jocularity to incisive speculation, Q realized he was sunk.</p><p>The only gambit left for him was to go on the offensive, which he did, with perhaps more viciousness than was strictly called for even under these inauspicious circumstances.</p><p>“Don’t flatter yourself, Bond.  You forget I know where you’ve been.”</p><p>As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Q regretted them, a feeling that only grew sharper as all expression fled from Bond’s face and his eyes went flat and cold:  He might as well have been made from granite for all the emotion he projected.</p><p>Q realized he’d just committed an unpardonable sin even as Bond turned toward the kitchen, tossing a neutral, “Go or stay, as you wish,” over his shoulder as he went.</p><p>Q went to the doorway, hovering uncertainly, feeling every kind of wretched as he watched Bond put the kettle on the hob for tea.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he blurted at last, unable to take the silence.  “That was a wretched thing to say, and I didn’t mean it.”</p><p>Bond turned from his tea preparations to lean back against the sink board, crossing his arms in the process, a clear signal that he wasn’t receptive to Q’s words.</p><p>“I think you did,” Bond said after another moment’s awkward silence.  There was no recrimination in his cool voice, only a matter-of-factness that brooked no argument.</p><p>Q shook his head, swallowing around a lump in his throat.  He hated feeling this way—wrong-footed, guilty, a queasy, cold soup roiling in his guts and frozen fingers raking his spine.</p><p>“I <em>didn’t</em>.  I don’t know why I said such a thing, but truly, I didn’t mean it.  I don’t think you’re a—”</p><p>“Whore?” Bond supplied as Q grasped for a word.</p><p>He felt heat break out across his face and knew that he was blushing fiercely.  He hated his traitorous complexion almost as much as he despised himself for what he’d said to Bond.</p><p>He couldn’t hold Bond’s eyes, which were fixed on Q’s face in chilly assessment, as if he were determining Q’s value as an asset…or a mark.</p><p>“I’d never—” Q began, but Bond made a dismissive noise in his throat and turned back to the teapot.</p><p>“I know what I am,” Bond said without looking at Q.  “I’d simply made the mistake of forgetting,” and he emphasized the word that Q himself had used, “with you.  Won’t happen again,” he promised as he turned to hand Q a mug of tea, made just as Q liked it.</p><p>As he accepted the tea, Q struggled with the lump in his throat, mortified to discover that he was on the edge of tears—tears of shame.</p><p>“Bond, wait,” he said, as Bond exited the kitchen through the far door.</p><p>Only a slight stiffening of Bond’s retreating shoulders indicated that he’d heard Q at all.  Then the door to their shared room closed softly behind Bond, and Q was left adrift on a sea of regret, shocked at how quickly he’d ruined the rapport they’d been sharing and aware of the fact that he’d just damaged their professional relationship, never mind whatever potential intimacy he may have allowed himself to imagine in the dark watches of the night.</p><p>“What an utter arse you are,” he said to himself under his breath, and then retreated to the dubious sanctuary of his laptop, where at least he could do his job without ruining anymore friendships.</p><p>****</p><p>Bond emerged a few minutes later, hair still damp from the shower, dressed in impeccably cut wool trousers, a blue shirt that brought out his eyes and that he wore open at the throat, and a grey tweed jacket that was almost too perfect for his accountant persona.</p><p>Even an hour ago, Q would have teased Bond about the jacket, but now every word he considered seemed to catch in his throat—along with his breath—and after his initial acknowledgement of Bond’s presence, he kept his eyes glued to the laptop screen.</p><p>Bond fixed himself another cup of tea and took it into the parlor, where the mellow strains of Schubert indicated that he was reading.</p><p>They had a couple of hours before supper and another hour after that before their date with the Gilchrist clan, and Q spent most of that time trying to work.</p><p>Moneypenny had sent a series of encoded messages embedded in the ridiculous cat memes she and Q had a long history of sharing.  These he transferred by memory stick to an unnetworked laptop he’d brought along for this purpose, on which he set a program to decoding Moneypenny’s notes.</p><p>Stuck waiting for the algorithm to finish its task, Q couldn’t help but dwell on what he’d said to Bond and Bond’s utterly blank expression as his words struck home.  He was still mentally carding through his options when Bond reappeared in the kitchen to ask, “Supper?”</p><p>“Oh,” Q said, as if the concept of dining in the evening was foreign to him.  “Um, sure.  That is, I can make something for us if you like.  It shouldn’t always be you taking care of me.  Equal labor and all that,” he babbled on, feeling his cheeks heat as Bond stared at him, a slightly bemused curl to his lips.</p><p>“Keep at it,” Bond said, nodding to indicate the laptop.  “We’ve enough left in the fridge from lunch for sandwiches, and I can heat up some of the soup I made yesterday.”</p><p>It was such a domestic conversation, innocent of undercurrents, that Q almost forgot what had transpired between them earlier.</p><p>Then Bond said, “You’ll need something in your stomach for Giles’ scotch, I suspect,” and it all came crashing back—the randy neighbor, Q’s unease with Bond’s teasing, his fear that Bond had discovered his true feelings.</p><p>“W-whatever you’d like,” Q stammered, fixing his eyes to the running program in the hopes that it would finish its work, so he’d have something to give his attention to other than Bond, working feet away in the tiny kitchen, smelling of aftershave and shower gel, competent hands assembling impressive sandwiches as if he were more at home with a carving knife than the more professionally lethal sort.</p><p>He delivered a cup of soup and a plateful of sandwich halves to Q’s elbow, saying, “Careful, the soup’s hot,” before taking his own meal into the parlor.</p><p>Q told himself it was because he had his work spread out across the breadth of the little kitchen table, but he knew from experience that Bond wasn’t shy about moving things about when he wanted to share a meal with Q, drawing him out with questions about his life outside of work, his hobbies, what sorts of films he liked—fodder for a half-dozen conversations they’d had over meals in the past several days.</p><p>Bond’s retreat to the parlor was a strong indication that Q had bolloxed up their relationship beyond recovery, and the food Bond had so carefully prepared may as well have been made of wood shavings for all Q tasted of it.</p><p>With his throat closed in dread, he finally abandoned both food and work in favor of dressing for their evening engagement, an activity that only increased his anxiety.</p><p>By the time he dressed in jeans, wool jumper, and a favorite scarf, Q thought he might end up revisiting his supper when it made a reappearance.</p><p>Swallowing past dread, he stopped in the parlor doorway to find Bond standing at the window, staring into the dark, an empty whiskey tumbler in his hand.</p><p>For all Bond’s reputation as a drinker, Q hadn’t seen him imbibe more than a single nightcap of an evening, from a bottle he seemed to treasure, given the way he looked on it with a certain fondness.  That he’d had to fortify himself before they headed for the Gilchrists’ didn’t bode well for the evening to come.</p><p>He refrained from saying anything, though, aware that following ‘whore’ with ‘drunk’ wasn’t the way to win back Bond’s good regard.  Besides, Bond wasn’t drunk—of that, Q felt sure.  An eminent professional, 007 would never risk Q’s safety by compromising his own effectiveness.</p><p>“Ready?” Bond asked, moving toward the front door.</p><p>Q nodded, “As I’ll ever be,” he lied.</p><p>Bond made a noncommittal noise and waited to hear the door lock behind them before following Q down the path and onto the road.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Home Visit</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You two really do make a lovely couple,” Maggie Gilchrist beamed over her second neat whisky of the evening.  It was hard not to smile back:  At five foot nothing, with curly white hair like lamb’s wool and the rounded, rosy cheeks of a lawn gnome, “Ol’ Maggie” was the incarnation of some ancient woodland spirit come to tempt a man to give up his mission in life to instead accept biscuits and whisky from her and admire her tatting.</p><p>“He’s my heart,” Bond agreed, touching the point of Q’s shoulder with the hand he’d had resting behind him on the loveseat for the past three quarters of an hour.</p><p>Q knew it was natural to look at Bond now and bask in his ostentatious affection, but he couldn’t.  He wasn’t sure he could take another light touch, fond glance, or fulsome declaration of ‘Quentin’s’ importance in ‘Bryan’s’ life.</p><p>Instead, he dropped a hand to Bond’s knee and patted it, saying, “Really, love, that’s too much.  We’re in public.”</p><p>He didn’t have to fake the blush on his cheeks:  Between the heat of the fire burning robustly in the hearth at one end of the modest parlor and the slow, peaty burn of whisky in his belly, Q was feeling rather overwarm, and that didn’t even account for Bond’s persistent proximity.</p><p>He’d hoped his words would warn Bond off the public displays.</p><p>Instead, Bond cupped Q’s shoulder and pulled him closer, so they were flush from hip to heel.</p><p>Only an act of supreme will kept Q from making a sound—whether of resistance or surrender, he’d never tell.  The whole night had been a kind of torture, and Q was beginning to think it was deliberate on Bond’s part, a game of chicken designed to make him as uncomfortable as humanly possible without actually blowing their cover.</p><p>“So, how did you meet?” Giles asked, dark eyes focused on Q’s hand, which was, he realized belatedly, still on Bond’s knee, a position he’d have to maintain for this next bit of fiction.</p><p>“Bryan was working on the internal audit team for my company,” Q supplied, having prepped this story a dozen times in the days leading up to the mission.  “As tech support, it was my job to set them up with a suite of computers and access to all of our electronic files.”</p><p>“I had ‘computer trouble,’” Bond continued, complete with finger quotes, “just to see if I couldn’t get his number.”</p><p>Q shrugged.  “The rest is history.”</p><p>“That’s a lovely story,” Maggie cooed.  “Aren’t they lovely, Giles?” </p><p>She’d started slurring a bit and listing to one side in her chair.</p><p>“They certainly are,” Giles said in a perfectly innocent voice, but his eyes were avid and hungry, leaving little doubt that his intentions were anything but pure.</p><p>“I think it’s time for you to retire, Mum,” he said then, in a far sterner tone.  “You’ve had a bit too much to drink.”</p><p>Maggie sighed and rolled her eyes.  “He’s such a killjoy.  How I could’ve raised such a son, I don’t know,” she complained as she slid from her chair and toddled her way toward the stairs.</p><p>Giles followed close behind her, throwing a wink over his shoulder that left nothing to the imagination concerning what would be proposed upon his return.</p><p>“We need to leave,” Q said through his teeth, risking a glance at Bond, whose eyes were following the Gilchrists’ progress with laser focus.</p><p>“Agreed,” Bond returned smoothly, standing and offering Q a hand, though there was no audience now to impress with the intensity of their love.  He tried hard not to read anything into it, just Bond being impeccably professional in his cover.</p><p>Even so, he couldn’t help notice how warm Bond’s hand was—Q’s hands were often cold—and the way the rough calluses on his palm and fingers corresponded with the deadlier activities for which 007 was notorious.  It was easy enough to imagine how that rough, competent hand would feel on some of his more sensitive skin.</p><p>Q turned toward the door before being stopped by pressure on his elbow—Bond signaling that their host was returning rather more quickly than Q had expected.</p><p>Giles loomed out of the darkness pooling at the bottom of the stairs and stepped entirely too close to Q to be accidental.  He had to strain his neck to look up into Giles’ face, and what he saw there made the whisky in his stomach slosh uncomfortably.</p><p>“Stay for another?” Giles said, as if he were asking Q to take off his clothes.</p><p>Bond stepped neatly between them, crowding Q back from Giles and straining somewhat less—though still quite a lot—to look up.</p><p>“We need to go, I’m afraid.  We’re taking a bit of a tramp tomorrow, weather permitting, and need our beauty sleep.”</p><p>“I’ll walk you home,” Giles rejoined, and Bond, whose hand was already splayed in the small of Q’s back, guiding him toward the door, didn’t pause in his urging, only saying, “That’s kind of you but unnecessary.  We know the way, and we like to gawk at the stars as we go.”</p><p>Bond’s broad shoulders blocked Q’s view of Giles as they reached the door, but he heard the man make a scoffing noise, as if he wasn’t buying Bond’s spurious excuses.</p><p>“G’night,” Q said, opening the door and plunging through it before Bond could get shirty with Giles—or worse, murder him in cold blood in his front hall. </p><p>Bond echoed Q, hand still at the small of his back, not so much pushing as guiding.  He felt safer with Bond there, between him and Giles’ greedy leer, and he said as much when they were finally through the front gate and onto the road that led back to their cottage.</p><p>“That was…” he trailed off, unsure of how to put it.</p><p>“Unsettling?” Bond supplied.  He’d taken his hand away, had them both in his pockets as he pretended to be an ordinary accountant type taking a wide-eyed gander at the star-crowded sky, but Q wasn’t fooled by his posture.</p><p>“Mm,” Q agreed, then, after a pause, “Thank you for getting us out of there.”</p><p>Bond shrugged.  “Despite my reputation, I’m not the sort to throw a lamb to the wolves.”</p><p>There was an edge to Bond’s comment—self-deprecation, yes, but also a bitterness that made Q’s belly go cold.</p><p>“Bond, I’m—” he began, hoping to deliver an apology that would stick this time.</p><p>“Don’t think of it,” Bond interrupted, stepping out at a brisker pace now that they were around a bend and out of sight of the Gilchrist croft and therefore no longer having to pretend to love—or even like—each other.</p><p>Q fell in beside him, keeping up, and feeling colder than the night air could account for despite the brisk pace. </p><p>“Bond, wait,” Q said, risking a hand on his arm.</p><p>Bond rounded on him with lethal precision; the starlight chiseled shadows beneath his eyes and along his cheeks—he looked almost alien, something brought down from those cold and distant stars.</p><p>“What do you want, Q?” Bond asked, standing a little too close, proximity a threat or a promise—Q wasn’t quite sure.</p><p>He wet his lips, suddenly nervous, Bond radiating a dangerous tension that frightened Q at the same time it sent a bolt of desire down his back.  It coiled around the base of his spine and pooled low in his belly.</p><p>“You,” he said at last, realizing Bond wasn’t going to make this easy for him.</p><p>“Fancy a quick shag, do you?  Something to write home about?”  For all that Q had earned the sneer in Bond’s voice, he still flinched to hear it.</p><p>But he was proud of the steadiness of his own voice when he answered, “No.  In fact, if that’s all I’d wanted, I wouldn’t have acted so abominably earlier, when I said what I did.”</p><p>He met Bond’s eyes, which were still opaque from starlight, unreadable.</p><p>“Explain,” Bond said at last, the terseness of the order belied by a certain cautious warmth in his tone.</p><p>Q looked to the stars, wishing they could offer him the words he was struggling to summon.  Bond waited patiently, as if he’d grown from the earth like a standing stone put there to make sense of the shadows.</p><p>“I thought you were having a go at me before, when you said—” He stumbled, unsure of how to explain that Bond’s more or less innocent words had set off a storm of insecurities in Q.</p><p>“I was flirting with you,” Bond said, “Because I’m interested in you.”</p><p>There was a wealth of meaning in that innocuous word.</p><p>“I must admit I’d expected a somewhat more…welcoming response.”</p><p>Q swallowed, nodded, took his courage in both hands.</p><p>“You should have gotten one,” Q confessed.  “I’ve wanted you for a long time, but…”</p><p>This time, Bond didn’t bail him out but merely bided patiently, letting the stars bathe him in their equivocal light.</p><p>“I was afraid that you only wanted me because we’re living in each other’s pockets, that I was…convenient.”</p><p>Q winced inwardly, recognizing how close that sentiment came to his earlier, brutal assessment of Bond’s character.</p><p>“I suppose I’ve earned that,” Bond answered after a moment’s tense quiet.</p><p>There were several more moments of even tenser silence before Bond stepped closer, the toes of his shoes almost touching Q’s.</p><p>This close, Bond’s features resolved themselves, growing warmer—human—once more.  His lip was curled up at one corner, early indications of a smile.</p><p>“My intentions, while not strictly chaste, are, at least, honorable where you’re concerned,” Bond said, his voice quiet, making the empty road, the looming mountains, the vast sky into an intimate space where only the two of them dwelled.  “In my line of work, I can’t promise you monogamy, but I can give you my loyalty…and my love, for what it’s worth.”</p><p>“Oh,” Q said, just that syllable, exhaled like it had been punched out of him.</p><p>Bond read it for the permission it was and closed the space between them at last, putting his hand at the base of Q’s skull and holding him still for a kiss, at first just the warm press of lips and then—another exclamation—the slide of his hot tongue into Q’s mouth.</p><p>Q tilted his head to deepen the kiss and pressed himself closer to Bond, wrapping one arm around his waist and another across the broad, strong shoulders, a sharp thrill lancing through him at the hard lines of Bond’s body and the noise he made at the contact.</p><p>They might have lost themselves to taste and touch, to breathless sensation, but for the sound of a vehicle approaching from the direction of the Gilchrist croft.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Home Invasion</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Bond broke the kiss and stepped away, taking Q’s hand and leading him off the road and behind a sprawl of rocks that some ancient cataclysm had scattered along the verge.</p><p>From their covert, they watched as a boxy old Land Rover crept along the track, high beams illuminating the shoulders of the road but not piercing the shadows where they crouched.</p><p>As the vehicle passed, Q could make out a familiar silhouette.</p><p>“What does he want?” Q breathed into Bond’s ear.</p><p>“I have some idea,” Bond said darkly.</p><p>Q felt a frisson of unease ooze down his spine.  Not that he feared for his safety, not with one of Her Majesty’s most brutal instruments at his side, but the kind of attention Giles seemed to have for them both was an inconvenience at best and at worst a downright threat to their real reason for being in the Highlands. </p><p>More disturbing still, nothing had shown up in the background check Q had run as a matter of course on each of their nearest neighbors, certainly not the sort of red flag that Gilchrist’s behavior was throwing up.</p><p>Their recourse was limited.  Q was sure that the disappearance of a local man would raise a hue and cry and bring undue attention to them, so they couldn’t kill him.</p><p>Q could create a diversion to distract Giles’ unhealthy interest in them going forward, but for that, he needed to get back to his laptop, and Gilchrist was between them and the cottage.</p><p>As if Bond had been following the path of Q’s thoughts, he said, “I need to get you home,” without any of the lascivious undercurrent Q might have prayed for only minutes before.</p><p>Bond stepped out of the shadows and onto the verge and stood listening for a while before signaling Q to follow him.  They stuck to the grassy shoulder, which sloped gently to a ditch before rising on the far side to taller grass, interrupted in a few meters by a stone wall marking the start of a pasture.</p><p>When they heard a vehicle coming toward them from the direction of their cottage, Q followed Bond over the ditch and the wall, which they used for cover until the Land Rover crept past once more.</p><p>As soon as its taillights were out of sight, they made haste to regain the road and jogged back to the cottage, Q grateful for the hours he’d spent on the treadmill since the Incident, determined to never again be prey.</p><p>Bond went in first to do a security sweep, and when Q entered at last, Bond said, “I’m impressed, Quartermaster.  Your command of field evasive maneuvers is excellent.  Full marks.”</p><p>Q smiled back, appreciating the teasing even as he felt a warm glow behind his breastbone, and went to retrieve his laptop from the secure hide they’d constructed in the floor of the parlor the day they’d moved in.</p><p>By the time he got to his usual place in the kitchen, Bond had the kettle on, and as Q began to dissect Giles Gilchrist’s life in minute detail, Bond set a steaming cup to one side of him and the digestive biscuits he liked on the other.</p><p>He left off his research long enough to say, “Thank you,” but got caught at the expression on Bond’s face, a warmth and fondness, familiar enough, but also a knowing, suggesting the shift their relationship had taken on the road only an hour before.</p><p>His heart tripped against his ribs, and he took in a breath before returning his attention to his work, reminding himself that there’d be time enough for him to pursue Bond’s look to its natural end once they’d eliminated the threat Gilchrist posed to their mission integrity.</p><p>Five minutes later, he swore viciously, fingers already flying across the keys.</p><p>“What is it?” Bond asked, coming to look over Q’s shoulder, and Q ignored him in favor of transferring Gilchrist’s Cayman Island bank accounts to a shell corporation he’d set up years ago at the old M’s command, a corporation that had no ties back to Her Majesty’s government.</p><p>“He’s got three million under a phony name in an offshore account,” Q explained after the transfer was complete.  “Or had, rather.  That should distract him.”</p><p>“Q?” Bond asked, in a tone that suggested his patience with waiting for a situational assessment was wearing thin.</p><p>“Giles Gilchrist died of SIDS when he was seven months old.  Maggie Gilchrist—no relation—is a 92-year-old invalid in a rest home in Inverness.”</p><p>“That’s suspiciously sloppy,” Bond noted, his casual tone belied by the cold, sure smile curling one corner of his mouth. </p><p>“Indeed,” Q answered.  “One might think he wanted us to find out.”</p><p>“Where did the money come from?” Bond asked.</p><p>Q shook his head.  “That search is still running—they wanted us to find the money but not its original source.”</p><p>“Any idea of ‘Gilchrist’s’ real identity?”  Bond asked as he checked his Walther.</p><p>Another shake of his head, biting of his lip.  “Give me a few minutes?”</p><p>“We may not have that, but I’ll give you what I can,” Bond said, brushing his fingers over the back of Q’s neck before leaving the kitchen. </p><p>Q barely registered the sound of the front door opening as Bond slipped outside to prowl the perimeter, watching for intruders.</p><p>Q focused on his work, running the financial forensics program in tandem with a darknet identity probe he’d developed in the bad old days, before M had made an honest man of him and his illegal programs.</p><p>Three minutes crawled by, Q willing the programs to ferret out even a single, useful detail, something that Bond and he could use.</p><p>Four minutes.</p><p>Five minutes.</p><p>The ping of his laptop delivering identification on ‘Gilchrist’ was drowned out by three shots fired in close succession:  One from the Walther, two from some other gun or guns.</p><p>In seconds, Q had forwarded the pertinent information to a cache he kept under an old alias that even the current M wasn’t aware of, unless the old M had proven perfidious, which Q doubted.  She’d liked her jokes at the expense of authority, even as she’d insisted on the letter of the law for everyone else.</p><p>Then, the double standard had irked Q, a fact that M well knew.  Now, he was grateful for her exceptional cunning.</p><p>The financial forensics program was still running, but Q was out of time.  He’d have to find out later who’d hired the hitman—for hitman he was, he and the old woman posing as his mother.</p><p>Q spared a thought for the original owners of the croft, who were doubtless buried in what had been not so long ago their own backyard, but even as his brain considered the gruesome possibilities, his hands were busy wiping his laptops before stowing them in the secure hide, from which he retrieved his gun and the go-bag they kept there for emergencies.</p><p>It contained passports, cash, ammunition, burner phones, and a few small but effective weapons of Q’s own design.</p><p>Time to field test them, Q thought, putting two miniaturized explosive devices into his left pocket and a handheld laser cutter into his right, to join the tiny but blinding flashlight he always carried.  The bag he slung over a shoulder, the strap cross-body, holding it in place.  It wouldn’t get in the way of his movement or fall off at an inopportune moment.</p><p>Into his back pocket went two spare clips for his Walther P99, which he’d modified for his personal use and which he’d already holstered at the small of his back.  It was also untraceable, much like the dummy corporation and darknet cache. </p><p>M had taken many secrets with her when she’d died; Q was grateful for her discretion now, as he considered what—or rather, <em>who</em>—they faced.</p><p>No more than ninety seconds had passed since the first shots had been fired when Q tripped the breaker on the electric panel and plunged the cottage into total darkness.  Then he pulled a balaclava up over his pale face and moved to the back door.</p><p>Fifteen seconds later he had his back to the wall beside the door, hand on the knob easing it open.  Taking a deep breath, Q pushed himself away from the wall, pivoted on his heels and threw himself through the opening, tucking into a roll and coming up at the bottom of the concrete stoop that functioned as the cottage’s back porch.</p><p>Still hearing nothing, Q crouched with his back to the cottage’s rough stone foundation and crept along it until he could peek around the west corner toward the front.</p><p>He caught movement on his periphery and threw himself flat on his belly seconds before a bullet struck the whitewashed stone wall above his head.</p><p>Pain lanced across the back of his hand and he an oath in half, resisting the urge to shake away the stinging burn likely caused by shrapnel from the bullet striking stone.</p><p>His options were limited, pinned as he was by whomever was shooting at him from beyond the garden wall.  Q stayed down, hoping the shooter would have trouble finding him in the deep shadow along the foundation.  Too, he had some cover, if his nose was any judge—the air around him was sharp with crushed rosemary, which made up a border behind which he was hiding.</p><p>If the shooter leapt the wall and came a few steps into the garden, he’d have a clear shot of Q, so he couldn’t stay where he was, yet he hesitated, sure that any movement would betray his position.</p><p>A second shot struck the wall and showered him in whitewash and stinging shrapnel, and that decided him:  Surging up into a crouch, Q darted forward, keeping as low as he could without sacrificing speed.  He was counting on the uncertain shadows in the garden to keep him safe.</p><p>He was on the west wall of the cottage now, which was dominated by an ancient espaliered apple tree.  He’d stand out against those skeletal, reaching arms, a perfect target for the shooter.</p><p>Throwing himself flat, Q crawled away from the cottage wall, using his elbows and toes, keeping his head down and expecting at any moment that his world would go forever dark and silent.</p><p>
  <em>Where the hell was Bond?</em>
</p><p>The heady scent of crushed lavender marked his passage through the perennial border, and Q spared a thought for what he’d smell like, assuming he survived.</p><p>A whisper of cloth against stone alerted him that someone was close by.  He froze, trying to hear another betraying sound over the thunder of blood in his own ears.</p><p>There!</p><p>With what felt like glacial speed, Q reached into his left pocket to extract one of the devices he’d secreted there.  Working by feel—he’d designed it to be used in the dark—Q armed the device.  A second press of the same indentation would give him fifteen seconds to throw it and get clear before it exploded, producing an explosion with enough concussive force to liquefy a man’s brains inside his skull.</p><p>Q hesitated, finger hovering over the kill switch, because he couldn’t be absolutely certain it wasn’t Bond himself on the other side of the wall only a meter and a half from Q’s position.</p><p>Then the familiar deep chuff of Bond’s Walther came from somewhere over Q’s left shoulder, from the front corner of the house, and the rapid blat-blat-blat of answering fire came from directly in front of him. </p><p>Hesitation evaporating in the sudden spike of adrenaline that came with being caught in the crossfire, Q pushed himself to his knees with one hand and used the other to trigger and throw the device in a high, short arc.</p><p>With no way of knowing exactly how accurate his aim had been, Q scrambled backwards, away from the wall, and then dropped flat, covering his head with his arms.</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>Then an enormous hand pressed him hard against the earth, robbing him of breath.  He tasted the peaty loam on his lips, smelled the damp, brown scent of it, tried not to breathe, lungs screaming, ribs creaking with the pressure.</p><p>And then the weight was gone, and he could lift his head, and Bond was on a knee beside him, one hand on his shoulder, the other covering him with the Walther.</p><p>Bond tapped him on the shoulder twice, a signal to get up, and Q pushed himself up on hands and knees, ears ringing with residual pressure.  He looked at Bond, whose lips were moving, and could hear nothing, which he indicated with a gesture.</p><p>Bond nodded, pointed to the front of the cottage, and indicated a three-count.</p><p>He was proud of how steady he was when he climbed to his feet, following Bond’s lead, waiting until Bond’s fingers folded one by one into a fist before he ran for the front of the cottage and flattened himself behind the cover of the cedar planted there.</p><p>Bond pressed against him, and Q felt the heat of his breath a moment before his voice came, as if from the bottom of the sea and through a gale, “One in the cottage and a second in the Land Rover at the road.”</p><p>Q could just make out its bulky shape in the milky starlight.  It was between them and their own vehicle, an unassuming, late model Audi with exceptional after-market modifications for the discrete spy-about-town.</p><p>Q nodded that he’d heard and understood and looked to Bond, who was inches away and smiling in the cold, toothy way of a shark.  Q suppressed a shudder as Bond leaned close again.</p><p>“Is that a mini-bomb in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”</p><p>Q quirked a superior eyebrow at him and returned a grin of his own, cool and a little feral.</p><p>“Think you can toss it through a window?” Bond asked.</p><p>He nodded, not trusting his volume control with his ears still muffled from the first concussion device.</p><p>Bond tapped his wrist, “Give me a forty-count, and then throw it and get clear.  I’ll signal you when it’s safe to approach the car.”</p><p>Q nodded again, and Bond tapped his wrist, mouthing, “One,” as he melted into the darkness of the front garden.</p><p>Q caught a glimpse of a shadow melting over the wall, and then he slipped back a few steps to the kitchen window, extracted his laser cutter, and made short work of the bottom right pane.</p><p>At thirty-five, he saw a figure break the dim light coming in from the parlor on the side opposite the kitchen and knew that his target was in range.</p><p>At forty, he armed the device by depressing the trigger twice, lobbed it through the hole he’d made, and threw himself flat on the ground behind the cedar and pressed his hands over his ears.</p><p>This time, the concussion was mitigated by the stone wall of the cottage, so he felt only a passing shove against his back and a sensation as of all the air being sucked out of his lungs.</p><p>Then he was up, pressed against the cottage and once more hidden from the killer in the Land Rover by the trusty old cedar.</p><p>When the lights on the Audi split the darkness of the night, Q took that as the all-clear and made his quick but cautious way toward the car.</p><p>He didn’t make it.</p><p>An immense hand picked him up and flung him through the air, shoving the air out of his lungs in the process.  He had seconds to recognize that he was airborne, and then the ground was rushing toward him.</p><p>He met it with a neat tuck and roll, fetching up hard against the tire of the Land Rover and laying there, stunned and breathless, until air began trickling back into his lungs.  His other senses returned in a flash of blinding light and a scorching heat that made him throw his arms over his face in a fruitless effort to keep from burning.</p><p>Then hands were tucked beneath his armpits, hauling him up and away from the conflagration that had once been their cozy little cottage hideaway.</p><p>Bond propped him against the hood and checked his pulse with one hand and his pupil dilation with the other before asking, “Are you hurt?”</p><p>At least, that’s what Q thought he’d asked—Q could hear only blood thunder and a high, sustained ringing in his ears.  He hoped it wasn’t a sign of permanent hearing damage, but he couldn’t worry about it just then.  Bond was moving him toward the passenger seat and getting behind the wheel, starting the car and pulling away with the precise competence with which he did all things.</p><p>Some miles away, Bond pulled down a rutted dirt road and behind the remains of a barn, listing now sharply to the east.</p><p>He shut the car off and turned toward Q, who was already looking at him with a question in his eyes.</p><p>Bond telegraphed his intention to kiss Q by cupping his cheek in one filthy hand and leaning with exaggerated slowness over the center console, eyes fixed on Q’s face, searching perhaps for consent or just assurance that he was, indeed, alright.</p><p>Then his lips, dry and warm, were pressing against Q’s, his tongue drifting lazily along Q’s lower lip, inviting himself in, and Q opened to him with a sound he felt in his throat rather than heard.</p><p>It seemed to Q the kiss lasted forever, but it must only have been a few moments when Bond pulled away with a rueful little smile and shook his head.</p><p>“Later,” he mouthed, Q stealing the last of the word from Bond’s mouth in a bold kiss.</p><p>Bond’s smile grew warmer and wider, and then he was starting the car and returning them to the road, where a fire truck, an ambulance, and two police cars were racing by, lights and sirens going.</p><p>Bond turned in the direction opposite the emergency, and they drove for a while, Q letting his mind drift, adrenaline let-down making him shaky and an entire work gang of miners setting up shop in his skull.</p><p>Q wondered vaguely where they were going, and then he remembered what car they were driving, and he said, “Pull over,” sharply, still unsure of his volume but not caring now if he were yelling—it was too important to wait.</p><p>Bond did as he was told without question or hesitation, bumping the Audi onto the muddy approach to a cattle gate.</p><p>Q got out without a word, and Bond followed, also silent, only his eyebrow asking the question.</p><p>Q went around to the driver’s side, opened the bonnet, and pulled out his keyring, on which he kept a multi-tool.</p><p>This he used to pry open the micro-processing unit he’d added to the Audi’s existing computer system.  Ordinarily, he’d have hooked his laptop to it and shut it down that way, but as needs must when the devil rides, he settled for detaching it from its custom mount and stowing it in his pocket. </p><p>By the time he was finished, Bond had swept one side of the undercarriage and was working his way along the rear when he made a noise of triumph and produced a tiny black box with an even tinier blinking red light.</p><p>Q’s mouth thinned.</p><p>“It was probably Gilchrist,” Bond said, noting Q’s unhappy expression. </p><p>Q shook his head.  “Keep looking,” he ordered, and Bond’s own mouth grew tight and unhappy before he resumed his search.</p><p>As Q had expected, a second, much more cleverly hidden tracker was secreted in the right rear quarter panel assembly.</p><p>“There are probably more,” he noted grimly as Bond crushed the second device beneath his heel.</p><p>Bond nodded, looking suddenly weary.  “We’ll have to acquire another vehicle.”</p><p>Q sighed.  “I’m afraid so.”</p><p>Neither of them voiced the obvious—someone on the inside had to have planted the tracking devices before Q and Bond had left for this top secret, eyes-only mission.  For that someone to have had access to their plans and Bond’s car, he or she had to have security clearance equal to Bond’s or perhaps even Q’s.</p><p>There was no one they could rule out, including M: They were now well and truly out in the cold.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Returning Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“There’s a Tesco Superstore in Inverness,” Q offered after they considered their situation in grim silence for a long moment.  He was getting the last use out of his phone before he destroyed it.</p><p>“Phone?” he said, and Bond dropped it into his waiting hand without a word.</p><p>Q set the phones on the ground and took out the laser cutter, which made quick work of them.  Soon, they were a holey, smoking ruin, and Bond was whistling appreciatively and grinning like a kid with a new toy.</p><p>“I only use my powers for good,” Q said, moving toward the car.</p><p>Bond said, “Right,” and climbed back into the Audi, Q following suit, and they were back on the road headed to the Tesco’s in question, where the carpark was huge and sprawling and the employees’ vehicles less likely to be immediately missed.</p><p>“I know where we can go,” Q said after they’d been driving for a quarter of an hour, turning his head to look at Bond to gauge his reaction.  “I have a place.  In Edinburgh,” he added.  “It’s untraceable, secure, and fully wired.”</p><p>Bond took his eyes from the road long enough to give Q a searching look, and then he nodded and said, “Get some rest if you can.  I’ll wake you when we reach Dingwall.”</p><p>Q didn’t think he’d sleep.  The prospect of inviting Bond into the Foundry, watching his professional gaze coolly assess the space Q had protected from even the previous M’s most ardent and devious inquiries…the space where Q had spent a whole other life, which felt like a hundred years and a million hard miles ago…</p><p>No surprise that he dreamed of Rae and Mish and Alain speaking to him as he swam in a giant aquarium, trapped behind glass, its convexity and the water itself distorting their faces, making them monstrous in their complete disappointment and disgust.</p><p>It was with a sense of relief that he came back to himself, Bond’s hand on his knee, Bond’s voice saying, “Half an hour.”  It was with even greater relief that he realized he could hear Bond almost clearly, as if through a heavy wool blanket instead of coming from a distant planet through stellar interference.</p><p>Q pulled himself out of his slouch, ran a hand over his face and through his hair, and took in their surroundings, happy that nothing looked familiar yet, a thought that made his stomach flip nervously.</p><p>Then it rumbled, and he remembered a diner he’d gone to a few times with Mish, a place where he wasn’t likely to run into any of his old crew.  It was a university dive, the sort he’d gone to when he was blending in, pretending to be just another student.</p><p>Q dragged his mind away from those memories and decided the diner wasn’t going to work after all.</p><p>“We’ll stop for a bite,” Bond said, reading Q’s mind—or maybe just having overheard his growling stomach. </p><p>Dawn was a suggestion of gray on the horizon when they pulled into a family restaurant advertising a “full English breakfast.”</p><p>The bell over the door announced their arrival, but the regulars at the counter didn’t look up.  A middle-aged dishwater blonde escorted them to a booth halfway down the left side of the restaurant.  Bond took the seat with a view of the door, and Q sighed himself into the opposite side, hating to have his back to it himself but knowing that Bond needed the sight line.</p><p>Bond gave him a tired but genuine smile.  “I’ll watch your back and your front,” he said, waggling his eyebrow ridiculously.</p><p>Q managed his own tired smile in return.  “Thank you.”</p><p>“Been here before?” Bond asked after they’d started on their second cups of coffee (Bond) and tea (Q) and were waiting for their food.</p><p>He wasn’t fooled by the casual tone. </p><p>“No,” he answered honestly.  He’d spent a few good weekends in Inverness, back in the salad days, when they’d been young enough to crash at hostels and hadn’t minded wrinkled clothes and tepid showers and scratchy, thin towels and the like, but he’d never been in this part of the city, and he didn’t see the need to explain anything further.</p><p>Bond had the good grace to accept Q’s terse response and with an almost invisible nod let Q know that the waitress was approaching from behind him with their breakfast.</p><p>They ate in companionable quiet as the steamed windows diffused the first yellow light of morning, which was unkind to Bond, bringing out signs of fatigue and hatcheting away at the sharp planes of his face.</p><p>Q wanted to touch his wrist, trace the crow’s feet at the edge of his eyes, ask impertinent questions that he knew he shouldn’t, especially not now.</p><p>Not where they were going.</p><p>Back in the car, Bond began to outline his plan for boosting a different vehicle.</p><p>Q said, “I’ll procure us a car,” looking straight out the front window, giving nothing away.</p><p>Bond didn’t hesitate.  “Alright,” and when they arrived at the Super Tesco, he parked near the front and went into the store, hands in his pockets and whistling something jaunty and off-key.</p><p>Q watched him go for a moment, admiring the departing view, and then scanned the cars parked near the plain grey door that read “Employees Only.”</p><p>As he’d hoped, there was a nondescript four-door sedan, new enough to have the usual cadre of technological advancements.  He strolled toward it purposefully, as if it belonged to him.</p><p>It took him eleven seconds to get through the keyless door and another twenty-three to start the car—he was getting soft in his old age, he thought—and then pulled up, bold as brass, to the loading lane where Bond was waiting with a reusable bag in his hand.</p><p>“Bread is on sale,” Bond noted as he slid into the passenger seat, apparently content to let Q lead, since it was, after all, the quartermaster who knew where they were bound to next.</p><p>Bond fiddled with the radio, discovering at last a regional station playing news, traffic, and weather.  It was only a few minutes before the news from Rosehall broke, Police Scotland investigating multiple shootings and an explosion in a ‘remote, sleepy’ area known mostly for holiday cottages and crofters.</p><p>After that, he found a classical station, which he kept on low, saying, “Alright if I sleep for a while?”</p><p>Q said, “Of course.  I’ll wake you when we get to Ingliston.” </p><p>As Brahms played softly, Q drove, glancing over now and then to look at Bond, who had reclined the seat and was breathing softly, his face at last relaxing, smoothing away the long night and hard realities of day.</p><p>The program host had one of those deep, mellow voices that invited confidences, and Q almost regretted when the Schubert piece began, missing the anonymous comfort.  For a short time, he’d let himself forget where they were going.</p><p>The sight of the Ingliston sign reminded him, though, and as they cruised past it, he said, “Bond,” loudly and clearly, knowing better than to touch him without some warning first.</p><p>He heard Bond’s breathing change and then risked a touch, just to ground him for a moment and remind him where he was and with whom.</p><p>Bond brought his seat up and looked about.  “How long?”</p><p>“Fifteen minutes.  It’s on this side of the city.”</p><p>Bond held his tongue, but there was a new tension between them that told Q it was time to tell him what he’d need to know to keep them both safe. </p><p>“I’ve owned the Foundry for ten years.  It was actually a silver foundry once upon a time and then it was gutted and used for storage.  It was a pile when I moved in—no windows, leaky roof, rats.  But it was quiet and private, which suited my needs.  And no one would think to find anything valuable inside, which was its best feature.”</p><p>Still, Bond said nothing, though Q could feel the weight of his gaze on him.</p><p>“I needed a place to work that wouldn’t be traced to me.  And I had…friends,” he hated the hesitation, the way it was still so hard even to acknowledge the people he’d left behind.  “Who needed a place to crash.  It worked out for everyone.”</p><p>It had, for a while.  For a while it had been golden.</p><p>He wasn’t going to tell Bond about that time.</p><p>“I’ve had a management company doing the upkeep.  I use an alias and an offshore account that can’t be traced to me.  It’s always been…”</p><p>Here, he took a hand off the wheel to make an indeterminate gesture.</p><p>“A fallback?” Bond suggested, and Q nodded, lips pressed together.  It was as good a term as any for the kind of lie you told yourself to sleep some nights, when the ghosts flashed at the edge of your sight and you were sure you could hear familiar laughter coming muffled through the walls of your London flat.</p><p>Q pulled into a multi-level car park, took a ticket, and left it dutifully on the dash as Bond wiped their prints—they’d been careful—and retrieved the Tesco bag.</p><p>Then he held his hand out to Q and waited.</p><p>Q knew it was for cover—a couple out for a stroll to the local Tesco Express to pick up lunch or lube or whatever it was couples purchased in the middle of the day.  He wouldn’t know.</p><p>Even knowing that it wasn’t for real, Q felt heat kindle in his belly as Bond wove his fingers through Q’s and said, “Lay on.”</p><p>They left the car park through a different door, and Q spent a little time leading them in mazy lines, taking them a kilometer or more out of their way before heading, slowly and indirectly but surely, to the Foundry.</p><p>The street the Foundry took up a half-block of was sparsely traveled, but there were, here and there, people about.  The neighborhood had gentrified some in the years since he’d bought the place, but it hadn’t yet gotten too populous for his needs.  Still, he was careful.</p><p>There was an enormous vertical accordian door facing the street and, beside it, a smaller, people-sized door, criss-crossed safety glass in the single narrow window.</p><p>He didn’t even pause there but led Bond down an alley on the east end of the building, giggling and giving him a drunken leer, drawing attention to them as a couple of poofs out for a quickie, so no one would look any closer.</p><p>Halfway down the damp, dim alley, there was another door, this one gunmetal gray.  It had no apparent handle and the words “FIRE EXIT, DO NOT BLOCK” stenciled on it in bold red letters.</p><p>Bond looked around with obvious professional interest, probably spotting the cameras, and Q said, “Shove me up against the door.”</p><p>Bond obliged so swiftly that Q startled, Bond’s mouth swallowing the sound of surprise he made at his eagerness to do Q’s bidding.  It was both attractive and alarming.</p><p>As Bond pressed him against the door and deepened the kiss, Q splayed his hand out as if he were seeking purchase under Bond’s focused assault.</p><p>There was a deep whirr and then a series of clicks, and Bond stepped back to let Q ease his weight away from the now open door.</p><p>“Very impressive,” Bond said, and Q couldn’t tell if he meant the kiss or the lock.</p><p>Q smirked, hiding his nerves, and said, “Welcome to my humble abode.”</p><p>Lights came on as he stepped through the door—LEDs in tulip-shaped bulbs illuminated the open floor plan.</p><p>To the immediate left was a kitchen area, a long breakfast counter acting as a divider between the working space and a neat square of polished parquet, over which was suspended a disco ball and a battery of revolving colored lights, now still and dark.</p><p>To the right of the dance floor was an overstuffed sofa and matching chairs, a coffee table made from a repurposed packing crate, two enormous bean-bag chairs, and a vast flat-screen TV, suspended from the ceiling and bracketed on either side by matching speakers.</p><p>A low, black, glass-fronted cabinet beneath it sported stereo and entertainment equipment, including enough gaming gear to host a small convention.</p><p>Q stifled the need to apologize for his decorative choices.  He’d been twenty-three when he’d left the Foundry, a different man entirely from the one who stood there now as nervous fingers carded through his guts.</p><p>“Straight ahead is the workspace,” he explained, indicating server towers, a bank of monitors, a dozen keyboards, and a suite of Herman Miller office furniture.</p><p>“Down there,” Q pointed to the west, “are two bedrooms and a full bathroom,” partitioned off with sound-dampening panels, “and my room is down here,” indicating the east end, nearest the door they’d come through. </p><p>“There’s another exit,” Q said, showing Bond the almost invisible hinge, the pressure plate to open it.  “It comes out on Stern Street,” he added, naming the street opposite where the building’s main, public entrance was.</p><p>“Bathroom,” he said, indicating the appropriate door, and then stepping into a cramped, dim room bristling with blinking lights and muscular black boxes:  “Electrics room—there’s a back-up generator for emergency power to the servers.”</p><p>Bond nodded to a tall, heavy-duty cabinet in one corner of the room.  “Gun safe?”</p><p>Q smiled and shook his head, “Data storage.”  He pressed a series of numbers into the datapad, and the door opened with a quiet hiss to reveal yet another server.  “Can never be too careful.  This one runs on its own power source, and it’s unnetworked.  Everything is saved to it by flashdrive.  It’s a pain, but it’s the only way to be sure.  Of course, I haven’t used it in years.”</p><p>He didn’t like to think about the reasons for that back-up server or why he insisted on being the only one with the keycode.  He can remember Rae saying, “What if something happens, though?” in that hurt little girl voice she’d get when Q treated them like they were strangers.</p><p>Of the Foundry crew, Rae had been the one who seemed to have known from the start what part Q was going to play in their destruction, some instinct in her honed by the years of abuse she took at the hands of her blood family.</p><p>“This place is a boffin’s wet dream,” Bond remarked, touching Q lightly on the arm, bringing him back to the present.</p><p>“Well, yes,” Q admitted, feeling suddenly shy, like he was standing there stripped to his skin and at any moment Bond was going to interrogate him intimately. His nerves drove him out of the electrical room, and he waited until Bond was beside him to key in the lock code, making sure Bond was watching.</p><p>“Impressive,” Bond said again, looking right at Q in such a way that he could not mistake Bond’s meaning.</p><p>Q resisted the urge to duck his head.  “Thank you,” he said softly. </p><p>Still, Bond did him the favor of asking no questions except, “Would you like the shower first?”</p><p>Q searched Bond’s face for signs of a second meaning—a salacious grin, a hidden question—but found only a passive, waiting look.</p><p>“You go ahead,” Q said.  “I have a few things I need to take care of.”</p><p>He showed Bond the linen closet in the bathroom on the west end, adjoining one of the two bedrooms there, and invited him to use whatever personal products he’d like.  There were a variety kept in stock in a basket beside the sink.</p><p>As Q turned to leave Bond to it, Bond already out of his jumper and shirt, hands moving to the button on his trousers, Bond said, “Thank you for bringing me here,” and Q turned back to step close and cup his face in his hands and kiss him, close-mouthed, almost chaste, but lingering, a warm, firm kiss, as if to hold Bond in that place and time, to preserve him—them—in the moment.</p><p>When he pulled away and turned once more to go, he felt Bond’s fingers trail down his back, and he had to fight with every ounce of will not to strip down and join Bond under the steaming water, to let this thing burning between them consume him for a while, long enough to blot out the steady ache in his chest being back here was causing.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. At Home with Ghosts</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>If he were honest with himself—and he’d bloody well better be, given where he was standing—Q knew he wasn’t to blame for everything that had happened.  There was responsibility to go around; no one was innocent.</p><p>But he was the one who had escaped with most of himself intact, and he’d never ceased feeling guilty, even when he was also fiercely grateful for the lifeline M had thrown him.</p><p>Back in the common area, Q was caught halfway to the kitchen by the sight of the Rubik’s Cube in the oak bowl they’d kept on a side table.  Of all the toys they’d kept around, that had been Mish’s favorite.</p><p>He could see Mish twirling across the dance floor with a long green feather in their hair, arms spread wide, belting out the theme song from Disney’s <em>Robin Hood</em> in a wicked, perfect imitation of Liza Minelli.  That’s what Mish had always insisted Q really was—taking from the rich and giving to the poor, even if ‘poor,’ in that case, meant them and others like them:  disenfranchised baristas, disowned queer kids, disenchanted druggies, all of them dropouts except for Alain, who’d looked up from his anatomy notes long enough to give Mish’s performance a frown and to say, “Do you mind?” in that faux public-school, butter-wouldn’t-melt voice that always made Q smile.</p><p>Rae had laughed and said, “You’re such a sour-puss,” and made a kiss-kiss face at Alain with exaggerated fish-lips and Alain had chased her around the flat hunched over like Quasimodo and growling like a constipated bear.</p><p>The ache in his chest has been joined by one in his throat, and Q sat down shakily on the edge of the couch because his knees were suddenly weak.</p><p>He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose.  He hadn’t cried in years, goddamnit, and he wasn’t about to start again now.</p><p>He’d given up enough tears when he’d made his choice, knowing the consequences but, of course, never dreaming, either, of what he’d lose…</p><p>And what he’d gain.</p><p>Q took a few deep, steadying breaths, counting around the fours until he could open his eyes and look at the space in front of him without remembering Mish sliding gracefully to their knees, hands on Q’s own knees, eyes looking up into Q’s with mischief and desire and trust and love.</p><p>Bond’s hand on Q’s shoulder was meant to let him know Bond had returned to the room, but as Q hadn’t yet quite gotten all the way back from the past, he startled under the touch and sucked in an ill-advised breath, which led to a coughing fit as he tried to clear whatever he’d aspirated.</p><p>By the time he was done, red-faced, nose running, Bond had a hand on either shoulder, not holding Q in place, just biding.</p><p>“Alright?” he asked quietly.</p><p>Q nodded and blinked the wetness from his eyes.</p><p>“Why don’t you get cleaned up, and I’ll make us a light supper?”</p><p>Q wasn’t sure he could swallow past the lump in his throat made up of one part regret and two sorrow, but he nodded and stood up and moved around the end of the couch to head toward the bathroom, when Bond stepped in front of him.</p><p>Q looked into those arctic eyes, saw the way the warmth in them softened Bond’s expression, saw beyond that a question he knew Bond would never ask.</p><p>Q let out a shuddering breath and leaned in to rest his forehead against Bond’s shoulder, just for a moment, just to regain his balance.  Bond’s arms came up around him, and he held him, not restraining, not claiming, offering what there was of comfort. </p><p>Q was grateful beyond words that Bond didn’t ask Q anything because in his fragile state, he might have answered, spilled it all—the hope and the risk and the loss and the crushing grief— and Q wasn’t sure what might happen then, wasn’t sure if Bond would ever look at him with that quiet, warm light in his face.</p><p>He had always been a selfish fool where love was concerned, so Q kept it all behind his teeth.  It would have to come out, he knew.  Better that he tell the truth than wait for it to ambush them at an inconvenient moment, especially given what they were up against.</p><p>But just for now, maybe just the afternoon, Q would keep silent and let himself make a few new memories to lay like heavy weights upon the restless ghosts that were rising up out of his past to haunt him.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>*****</p><p><br/>
After a shower in his old bathroom, he climbed into clothes he’d scrounged from the chest of drawers in his old bedroom and tried not to feel self-conscious.  The jeans were snug—he’d filled out some—and the tee-shirt, advertising a band that must have died in its infancy, stretched tight across his shoulders.</p><p>He felt the weight of Bond’s hot look like a hand on his chest as he crossed the living area toward the kitchen.</p><p>Bond gestured him onto a stool at the breakfast bar, where there was a cup of steaming tea, a bowl of soup, and a hunk of buttered bread waiting for his attention.</p><p>“I could get used to this,” he said, not thinking, and Bond chuckled, a low stroke of sound that made Q shiver.</p><p>“I didn’t mean—” he began when he’d recovered himself.</p><p>“It’s alright,” Bond said.  “I like taking care of you.”</p><p>Q looked up sharply, not liking the paternal note, only to find that warm fondness back in Bond’s eyes.</p><p>“Not,” Bond added, as if sensing the direction of Q’s concerns, “That you need me to.  You’re clearly capable of taking care of yourself.”</p><p>Q had a feeling Bond meant more than his facility with mini-bombs, and as Bond swept a glance over the Foundry, indicating all of it—its functionality, its size and scope, its very existence as a secret Q had kept for a decade or more—Q accepted the feeling of quiet pride that filled an empty space in his ribcage even as he ruthlessly shoved aside the constant, harrying attention of the memories that wanted to remind him of how he’d achieved it all.</p><p>“Would you like to go to bed with me?” he heard himself ask over the rim of his mug.</p><p>Bond said, “Fuck, yes,” in that elegant Eton voice of his, and then, “Finish your soup,” as if it were perfectly normal to be propositioned by his quartermaster over a bowl of tomato bisque.</p><p>Q didn’t have much of an appetite, his nerves playing hell with his stomach and his memories crowding into his throat, but he did his best, and Bond eventually relented and took the dishes to the sink, letting them soak in sudsy water.</p><p>Bond was barefoot, wearing a pair of loose sweats and a tee-shirt that must have been in the go-bag Bond had pulled from the boot of the abandoned Audi, a habit of long years, as he’d explained to Q.</p><p>So casually dressed and undertaking such a domestic chore, Bond looked at home in the kitchen, like he’d been living in the Foundry with Q for years.</p><p>Q wondered if that were a skill Bond had learned of necessity—blending into any environment—or if it were just the man himself, comfortable in his own skin.</p><p>Then Bond turned from his chore to fasten his eyes on Q, and Q forgot what he’d been thinking.</p><p>Heat spread its tendrils through his belly, making him shiver.  The voice that came out of him, breathy and high and wanting, didn’t sound like anyone Q knew.</p><p>“Now, please,” he said, not quite begging.</p><p>Bond crossed the space between them and took Q’s hands in his in a loose grip.  Q could feel the heat of Bond’s body, could smell his clean, sharp scent.  Unbidden, he imagined dropping to his knees, pulling Bond’s sweats away from his body and sucking his cock down in one long draw. </p><p>Saliva flooded Q’s mouth and he swallowed convulsively.</p><p>“Are you sure?” Bond asked, holding Q’s gaze.</p><p>The question made him want to giggle hysterically.</p><p>Q shook his head, and then saw by the doubt that darkened Bond’s expression that he’d indicated the opposite of what he meant.  It was just that he didn’t have any words for what he wanted.</p><p>“Yes, I’m sure,” Q answered.  “Please,” he said again, still sounding high and far away.</p><p>And part of him wasn’t in his own skin.  Part of him, he imagined, was perched high overhead on one of the massive girders that crisscrossed the rafters, looking down at him as he slid his foot between Bond’s two, pressing himself against Bond and putting his open mouth against Bond’s closed one.</p><p>Bond made a noise, bitten off, and closed the circuit, tongue snaking into Q’s mouth, and then Q lost time, the afternoon breaking into flashes of sensation—</p><p>Bond’s hands, warm and sure, skimming up Q’s sides as he took off Q’s shirt</p><p>Nimble fingers at his waistband, shoving his jeans down.</p><p>Sure, callused fingers around his cock, stroking as he heard himself as if from a distance moaning</p><p>weightlessness</p><p>the cool fabric of the couch against his naked skin</p><p>the perfect pressure of Bond against him, a knee spreading his thighs</p><p>the lightning arcing from his neck, where Bond was sucking a lovemark into his skin, to his cock, gripped in Bond’s confident hand</p><p>hot breath on his nipple, belly, the furnace heat of a mouth around the head of his cock and the strangled sound he made at the impossible suction</p><p>the dark chuckle and then Bond’s voice, deep and low, saying, “Spread a little more for me,” before a finger circled his pucker, making him writhe for it</p><p>he was gone, far and away, only half inhabiting his body as Bond’s mouth and fingers worked him to an impossible tension</p><p>He tried to cry out, say Bond’s name, tried to remember what it is he was supposed to be doing—there was something, he was sure—but Bond was relentless, with all the patience and focus his profession required, a second finger joining the first, his tongue pressing Q’s cock against the back of Bond’s throat, and Q was shaking and crying now, some dim part of him ashamed of the weakness, terrified of how separate from himself he’d become</p><p>And then he was obliterated, the world whiting out as pleasure roared through him, an arm across his hips keeping him from choking Bond, the fingers inside him huge as he clenched around them, and then the mouth pulling away so that low, wicked voice could say, “That’s it, Q, you’re so good.  Fuck but you’re gorgeous, oh, love, what you do to me,” as he disappeared entirely inside sensation.</p><p>Only later—a day or an age—sprawled in a sweaty mess, aching in that perfect, boneless, post-shag way did Q remember.</p><p>“Can I?” he asked, though it was muffled against Bond, who was lying beside him on his side on one of the couches—they hadn’t made it to a bed—with Q bundled against him.</p><p>Bond chuckled, that rich, wicked sound, and said, “Unnecessary,” guiding Q’s hand to his quiescent—and damp—cock.</p><p>“Oh,” Q breathed when his sex-slowed brain made sense of the evidence.</p><p>“I told you that you do things to me,” Bond noted, pressing a kiss to Q’s sweaty forehead.</p><p>Q wrinkled his nose.  “I need another shower.”</p><p>“We both do,” Bond agreed.  “But I think we can afford a little nap just now.”</p><p>The Foundry ran to cool, the space too massive to ever really heat properly, but Bond was warm against him, his strong thigh between Q’s own, one arm under Q’s head and the other around his waist to keep him from rolling backward off the couch.</p><p>Q snuggled in closer, Bond murmuring approval and holding him tighter still, and then let his eyes close and his mind drift, soaking up Bond’s delicious heat and slipping under for a spell.</p><p>When he came back to himself, Q had the couch to himself and a blanket tucked around him snugly.  There was a pillow under his head, and his glasses had been removed but the coffee table pulled closer, so he could reach them.</p><p>He smelled coffee and heard faint noises from the kitchen, and when he raised his head to look, he saw Bond seated at the breakfast bar cleaning his Walther, the parts laid out on a dishtowel, a little can of gun oil next to a tiny brush.</p><p>“You brought your gun kit out of the cottage when you went after those guys?”</p><p>As post-first-time romantic declarations went, it needed work, but Bond’s smile curled one corner of his lip when he shook his head and answered, “I keep a spare in the car.”</p><p>“Of course, you do,” Q said, sitting up and reaching for his glasses.  “What time is it?”</p><p>“Little after two.  Coffee?”</p><p>“Please,” he sighed, slipping back into his clothes, feeling a little, shy thrill to realize Bond must have cleaned him up; he smelled vaguely of the lavender-pine wipes they’d always kept in the bathrooms for when they were running late for something. </p><p>Bond pointed in the direction of the counter, where a stainless-steel carafe on a hot plate sat beside a mug with the logo of the University of Edinburgh on it.  He’d even found the shelf- stable milk, a blessing for which Q might have to fuck him all over again.</p><p>Electric heat arced through him at the thought, and he shivered, not just because the concrete floor was cold on his bare feet.</p><p>Bond had the Walther reassembled and was just closing his gun care kit.</p><p>“What’s on the slate for this afternoon?” Bond asked, and Q felt a stirring of unease at the reminder that he was the boss here, both technically and actually.</p><p>Not to mention that it was his house.</p><p>“I’m going to access the files I saved about ‘Gilchrist’s’ identity before things went to hell last night and then restart the financials search.  It may take a while.”</p><p>“Mm,” Bond answered.  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to do a full security assessment of the Foundry.”</p><p>He didn’t say it like he was asking, and Q wasn’t offended by the suggestion.  He might be an expert in surveillance, but Bond had vastly more field experience, and he’d feel better knowing that Bond had reviewed his measures to keep them safe.</p><p>He said as much, and Bond picked up his gun and came around the bar to kiss the corner of Q’s mouth and then slip away.</p><p>Q was vaguely disappointed that they hadn’t discussed their afternoon delight and then a little annoyed at himself for acting like a teenager when they were in full-on crisis mode.</p><p>With a sigh, he went to retrieve a secure laptop from the electrical room and sat cross-legged on the couch it in his lap. </p><p>Q didn’t do more than glance at the work area, with its banks of monitors and wrist-saving keyboards and ergonomic chairs.  Too many memories came with the space; it was large and empty yet crowded with ghosts he could almost feel and hear.</p><p>It didn’t take Q long to retrieve the information on ‘Giles Gilchrist,’ real name Martin Tremont, ex-SAS, dishonorably discharged in ’05 for killing three civilians in a village in the Hindu Kush, hired for freelance mercenary work on and off for another six years until he seemingly went off the grid.</p><p>The last intelligence report—a terse thing full of acronyms from some operational officer hoping to recruit Tremont—suggested he’d either been killed or captured in the DRC.</p><p>“Apparently not,” Q muttered to himself, typing one-handed notes into an open doc file before starting the financials search on Tremont.</p><p>While he waited for the algorithm to do its thing, Q stared at Tremont’s picture, trying to superimpose the leering giant from—<em>god, was it only last night</em>—with the sandy-haired, flint-eyed SAS sergeant in digital desert camo smiling at the camera as the bloke next to him took a deep drag on a cigarette.</p><p>“Not much to look at, is he?”</p><p>Q was proud that he managed not to jump in his seat, though his heart was kicking against his ribcage.</p><p>“I don’t suppose appearance means much in this case,” Q noted.  “After all, his mother seemed a tottering old dear, didn’t she?”</p><p>“Mm.” </p><p>Q was coming to recognize that response for Bond’s withholding judgement sound.</p><p>“You had your suspicions?”  He looked at Bond curiously, but Bond’s face was giving nothing away.</p><p>“I always do.”</p><p>It was Q’s turn to make a noncommittal noise: “I suppose it comes with the territory.”</p><p>“Yes, and people rarely give me reason to regret it.”</p><p>Q would have like to say that that was a sad statement, but he felt the truth of it in his bones, situated as they were on the couch where he and Mish used to make long, slow, anatomically improbable love.</p><p>Mish was long gone, but Q was still there…and still making love on the couch.</p><p>He also might have preferred Bond to add, “Present company excluded,” but he didn’t push the point.</p><p>They both had things they weren’t ready to share.</p><p>“The financial search is still running,” Q said, glancing at the clock at the corner of the screen.  “We could go out, get some groceries, let you see more of the neighborhood.”</p><p>“You won’t be recognized?”  Bond’s tone was careful, almost painfully so, and Q felt a hand squeeze his heart.  He didn’t want to be the one putting that neutral expression on Bond’s face.</p><p>“I haven’t been back here in a decade, and I didn’t spend a lot of time in this neighborhood—outside of the Foundry—when I did live here.  And I…looked different…when I lived here last.”</p><p>Q looked up at Bond, who was still wearing the careful look, still obviously not pushing.  Was it because Bond felt they weren’t yet at a point in their relationship that he could ask, or was he guarding his own heart from the answer?</p><p>There was only one way to find out, and Q wasn’t strong enough yet to take it, so he deflected.</p><p>“There used to be a wonderful mom-and-pop place a few blocks from here; I might avoid that.  Ma Ryan would probably recognize me.  Otherwise, we should be alright.”</p><p>“Let me change,” Bond said, moving toward the far side of the room, where the guest rooms were situated. </p><p>“You don’t have to stay in one of those rooms,” Q said.</p><p>Bond turned back to look at Q and shrugged, “I thought you’d prefer your privacy.  And I didn’t want to make any assumptions about our sleeping arrangements.”</p><p>Q cursed his fair complexion as he felt heat spreading across his cheeks, but he brazened it out.  “You’re welcome to share my room…and my bed, Bond.  It’s not like we’ve anything to hide, after all.”</p><p>Except Q did, of course, so very much.</p><p>“Alright,” Bond agreed, moving again toward the far rooms.  “I’ll move my kit later.  Let’s scrounge up something besides canned soup for supper.”</p><p>Q recognized champion level deflecting when he heard it, being himself a professional at dodging the real question.  It dashed cold water on the images he’d been enjoying of Bond spread out on the big bed in his old room and seemed to confirm Q’s suspicion that Bond’s caution wasn’t solely for Q’s feelings but also to guard his own.</p><p>Q was fucking things up.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Home Truths</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sighing, Q retreated to the room in question to change into street clothes and retrieve some cash from the go-bag he’d taken out of the cottage before it had exploded.  He also slipped an ID into his pocket, this one identifying him as Garrett Longren, 32, of London.  At the same time, he gathered the various alternate identities for Bond.</p><p>“Do you need one of these?” he asked, indicating the handful of passports and driving licenses, looking at the documents rather than at Bond.</p><p>When he did make eye contact, it took him a moment to remember what he’d been asking because Bond was dressed in a heathered blue Henley that brought out his eyes and jeans slung low on his hips that hugged his powerful thighs.</p><p>Q swallowed and recalled what he had in his hand.</p><p>The smirk on Bond’s face suggested that Q had been caught staring.</p><p>Owning it, he grinned.  “I could get used to seeing you in that.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Bond answered, smiling in return.  “And no thank you, I’ve got my own.  Hold on to those in case we’re burned here.”</p><p>Q didn’t want to think about the series of events that would have to transpire for them to be tracked to the Foundry.  It reminded him of the fact that they’d been betrayed by one of their own and that the mole might be much closer to them than they’d at first suspected.</p><p>He took a moment to return the false identities to the safe and then, with a few flicks of the laptop’s keys put it into silent mode, where it would appear to any unlikely intruder as a dead screen while still running its important work in the dark.  Anyone who tried to access it other than Q himself would fry the motherboard.</p><p>“Shall we?” he asked, gesturing to the door, figuring Bond would want to precede him through it.</p><p>The monitor to the right of the doorframe showed nothing on the four cameras—one for either end of the alley, one for the area around the door, and one covering both roofs, though admittedly at some distance.</p><p>The fourth image earned a whistle from Bond.  “Very impressive,” he purred.</p><p>“You’re doing that on purpose,” Q accused, having to suppress yet another delicious shiver of want.</p><p>“Maybe,” Bond admitted, voice rich with warmth.  “But you like it,” which was the absolute truth, though Q saw no point in saying it out loud. </p><p>Bond threaded the fingers of his hand through Q’s, leaving his gun hand free, naturally, and let Q take the lead once he’d determined that the alley was free of dangers great and small.</p><p>Q brought them to a more residential neighborhood four blocks away, where there used to be little shops and businesses—a barber, an accountant, two attorneys, a green grocer, a tea shop with a bakery, and a place that sold deep fried everything.</p><p>On the next block had been an Indian takeaway, the inevitable chips shop, two pubs, a variety of empty storefronts, and a Presbyterian church.</p><p>Q couldn’t decide if he was more sad or relieved to discover that most of the places he remembered were still there, though a few had suffered gentrification (tea shop, green grocer, church) and two were gone (one attorney and the chips shop). </p><p>They took their time looking in windows, making their slow way down the streets and then crossing at a corner to stroll back down the far side, the late afternoon sun weak and watery but still welcome.</p><p>They passed a handful of people, saw more inside the various shops, and watched the utterly quotidian vehicle traffic as it passed them by, no one seeming especially suspicious or at all out of the ordinary.</p><p>It was almost relaxing to be so anonymous.  He could get used to this Garrett fellow.</p><p>One of the previously empty storefronts now housed a combined bookshop and stationer’s, and they lingered here longer than in other places, Bond slipping his hand into Q’s back pocket and leaning toward him as though whispering something inappropriate for public airing.</p><p>“No sign of anyone following us,” he reported, pressing himself against Q and using the pocketed hand to draw him closer.  “You should kiss me, for the sake of our cover.”</p><p>“Really, that’s the best you can do?” Q answered with a roll of his eyes, but he complied happily, letting Bond deepen the kiss before trailing kisses along his jaw and down his neck.</p><p>“Bond,” Q breathed, and Bond said, “Just making sure the coast is clear,” before at last standing back and removing his hand from Q’s arse.</p><p>“You’re incorrigible,” Q groused, but as he had blood blooming high on his cheeks and could feel that his lips were still kiss-damp and buzzing, he didn’t think his objection would have much sway.</p><p>“Let me make it up to you,” Bond said, indicating the teashop across the way.</p><p>Q suppressed the swelling joy in his chest, reminding himself that this was hardly a date, and besides, they’d already slept together, but he couldn’t stop heat from curling in his belly at the press of Bond’s hand at the small of his back and his murmured, “You look edible,” as they entered the shop and found a table in the corner, within view of both exits and the wall of windows fronting the street.</p><p>Bond bought them tea and chocolate-dipped shortbread that was even better than Q had remembered.</p><p>“You have,” Bond said, leaning over to wipe his thumb across Q’s bottom lip.  “Got it.”</p><p>“I’m sure,” Q answered, shifting a little in his chair as Bond sucked the errant chocolate from the pad of his thumb.</p><p>“Don’t you two make a picture?” a young woman with purple hair and a tattoo of a swallow on her neck said, holding up an old-fashioned Kodachrome.</p><p>Q felt his blood run out of him, and the next breath he took froze his throat on the way down.  He swallowed to try to clear a sudden ringing in his ears, and only when he felt Bond’s fingers close over his own did he manage to say, “No, thank you.  He’s shy,” indicating Bond with what he hoped was a fondly exasperated look but which he suspected made him look more like he was about to ask for the location of the washroom.</p><p>“Aw, too bad,” she pouted, moving toward a table closer to the windows where two women were sharing a heart-shaped pastry, fingers brushing teasingly as they tore it to shreds.</p><p>“We need to go,” he managed, sounding far away, and Bond didn’t ask questions, just stood up and led Q out into the fading light of late afternoon.</p><p>“I take it you knew her?” Bond asked after a two-block silence.</p><p>Q nodded.  He wanted to say more, but he was clenching his teeth so hard that his jaw felt like it had been wired shut.</p><p>Back at the Foundry, grocery-less and feeling foolish, Q let them in and closed the door behind him, checking his secret safeguards without bothering to hide them from Bond, who’d probably noticed the microfilament in the doorjamb and the laser-activated silent alarm attached to the underside of the kitchen counter, even if it was no larger than a thumbtack.</p><p>Focusing on these details soothed him enough that he was mostly okay by the time he turned to look at Bond, who was standing a meter inside the door in the posture Q associated with retired military men waiting for someone to tell them what to do.</p><p>On Bond, “at ease” still managed to look dangerous.</p><p>“This place is full of ghosts,” Bond said, gesturing at the living area—the television and gaming consoles and the sofa on which they’d made love earlier.</p><p>“I know.  I’m sorry,” Q started, but Bond shook his head.</p><p>“There’s nothing to be sorry for, love.  If we spent all of our time apologizing for the baggage we brought with us, we’d never sleep nor get anything done.”  Bond’s smile was wry and real, and Q felt pressure behind his eyes and closed them to keep from loosing the sudden tears in them.</p><p><em>I don’t deserve you</em>, he was thinking.</p><p>What he said was, “Sit with me?”</p><p>Q sat on the sofa and patted the spot beside him, swinging himself around so he was facing Bond, who mirrored him.  Their knees touched, and he felt a silly buzz of electric joy at that simple gesture of intimacy.</p><p>He wasn’t sure where he was going to begin until he did.</p><p>“I was in love with a person named Mish, whom I met at a club when I was nineteen.  Mish was loud and bold and wild and beautiful, and I was none of those things.  They made me feel like maybe the world was worth living in after all.</p><p>I’d been on my own for three years at that point, had dropped out of school and was living on part-time courier work and whatever I could cajole out of bank machines with a handheld device I’d cobbled together from parts I stole from the local Maplin.</p><p>Mish was the one who told me maybe I could do more than just steal other people’s cash for a living.”</p><p>Q was talking too fast, trying to get it all out in a rush.  He paused and took a deep breath and then continued, his pace almost painfully deliberate.  The next part was going to be harder.</p><p>“Mish introduced me to Rae and Alain.  Rae was a bartender at a club, but she was also wicked at jimmying a back door into anything, and Alain was reading medicine at uni and pretended not to know anything about where Rae got the rent for their flat.</p><p>They took me in, even though I was a little younger than they were, let me crash on the couch in their flat until Mish and I could get a place of our own.</p><p>That place was a cold water fourth floor walk-up, but it was ours, and we were happy for a while.</p><p>I got enough together for a real laptop, and Mish took my job as a courier while I stayed home and put my hacking skills to better use.  I spent about six months doing legitimate work, all above-board and legal—remote tech support, web design for small businesses, independent contracting for this or that project.</p><p>It was boring, but it paid the bills, and I was trying to be good for Mish.”</p><p>Q paused again.  He felt light-headed and a little sick, tension turning his stomach to a roiling mess.  He swallowed hard, willing the nausea away.</p><p>It was hard to put this next sequence into words because in his head it had always been a blur—Alain getting excited about some cause he’d read about on campus, Rae spiraling out from one of her post-traumatic episodes, wanting something to cling to.</p><p>Mish looking at him with big, hopeful eyes, wanting Q to fix things.</p><p>Mish had always had more faith in Q than Q had deserved.</p><p>“I think I was joking?”</p><p>Bond nodded, traced the back of Q’s hand where it rested on his knee, not distracting, just encouraging.</p><p>“But I said something about stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and Rae got really excited, and Mish smiled at me like I’d made the sun rise, and even Alain seemed not entirely against the idea.”</p><p>Q took a deep breath.</p><p>“That’s how it started?” Bond said, giving Q time to pull himself together.</p><p>“Yes.  Good intentions, right?”</p><p>“I would have done anything for Mish,” he confessed in a hushed voice.  “So, I designed a back door into a hedge fund management company called Goliathan, and I targeted offshore accounts, the kind of secret accounts people who earn their money in shady ways set up to keep the government from arresting them.  And the money rolled in.”</p><p>“Alain got what he needed for a medical trip to Chad to help South Sudanese refugees, and Rae quit bartending so she could write full-time, and Mish didn’t have to bike anymore, and it was just…really great.”</p><p>Q looked at the rafters overhead and then at the high, segmented windows tucked in along the top of the walls.</p><p>“I loved this place the minute I saw it.  We got it for a steal—it was in such shite condition.  </p><p>There were leaks in the roof and the wiring was shot.  There were rats and crack pipes everywhere.  There wasn’t an intact window in the place.</p><p>I purchased it under an assumed name through a shell company and started putting some of my Robin Hood funds to work.”</p><p>Q remembered vividly the first time he’d walked into the Foundry after the renovations were done, sucking in a lungful of new hardwood and fresh plaster smell and wondering if joy could kill him.</p><p>“How old were you?” Bond asks, voice quiet, nonintrusive.</p><p>“I turned twenty-one two days after we moved in.  I thought we were on top of the world.”</p><p>“Long way down,” Bond observed.</p><p> Q swallowed and nodded.</p><p>“What happened?” Bond prompted after a long stretch of silence, in which Q tried to figure out how to tell the next part.</p><p>“Mish happened.  And Rae.  They were always more impulsive than Alain.  We called him our ‘Daddy,’ and it was only sometimes sarcastic.  He grounded us in a lot of ways; he had a calling, a real purpose.  He was going to be a doctor. . . .</p><p>He died first.”</p><p>Q swallowed again, something in his throat making it hard to breathe, like he’d been gut-punched by a grief he had thought he was through feeling—the frozen, throat-closing awfulness when he’d found Rae kneeling on the wet pavement of the alley behind their favorite coffee shop with Alain’s bloody head in her lap.  </p><p>“He’d been dead for hours when I found Rae with him,” Q says.  “She was holding him like he was sleeping.  She even shushed me as I walked up.  Said he needed his rest because he was starting his residency the next day.”</p><p>“Later, I found out that Mish and Rae had gotten the idea to expand our Robin Hood operation.  They used my program and picked random accounts.  They were going to surprise me with a car for my twenty-second birthday.  But they messed up, and someone traced the theft back to us.”</p><p>Into the pause as Q tried to summon up enough spit to speak without coughing, Bond said, “The kind of someone who doesn’t want to involve the police and prefers to do the dirty work up close and personally.”</p><p>He heard his breath shuddering as he took it in and forced his mind away from the memory of Rae’s face when Q had told her they had to get Alain out of the alley.</p><p>“We didn’t dare call the police, of course, so we loaded him into the car Alain had died to buy me and drove all the way to the Trossachs at 5 kilometers under the speed limit to dump him in a tarn in the woods near a trail we’d sometimes hiked together.”</p><p>“Then I came home and planned a murder.”</p><p>Q didn’t dare look at Bond then; it was one thing to know that he’d killed professionally—it wasn’t precisely MI6’s raison d’etre, but it was close enough, and anyway, Bond wasn’t exactly going to be tossing the first stone here—but to know he’d done it in cold blood long before he’d had a government sanction?</p><p>“It was self-defense,” Bond said then, as if he’d anticipated the turn in Q’s thoughts.</p><p>“You can say that if you’d like, but I know what I did,” Q answered, looking at him at last.</p><p>Bond’s eyes held regret and sorrow and a knowing bone deep.  It made Q sad for Bond and for himself, which he supposed was the right way to feel, insofar as there was any program for this sort of confession.</p><p>“Anyway,” he went on more briskly, as if dismissing the swimming queasiness in his gut and the coldness in his throat was as easy as putting on a broadcaster’s voice.  “Police Scotland didn’t see it that way when they arrested Mish for accessory after the fact.”</p><p>“Mish,” Bond said.  “But not you.”</p><p>“Tale old as time, right?” Q breezed, feeling sick to his stomach.  There was nothing funny about what had happened to them—any of them, but especially to Mish, the freest spirit, the brightest light.</p><p>“That night we stayed in a rat-trap motel where the manager accepted cash and asked no questions.  Rae took a hot bath and too many pills.  I found her.  She was still alive—barely—but we couldn’t take her to the hospital because we didn’t know which of our identities had been burnt—and anyway, she wanted to die.  She made that clear.  She was very thorough and thoughtful, too—no mess, just drain the water, wrap her in the shower curtain, and Bob’s your uncle.”</p><p>Q heard himself croak like a dyspeptic frog, felt his gorge rise, and knew he wouldn’t make it to the bathroom.</p><p>He threw himself off the couch and toward the Snoopy bin that sat at the end of the couch, heaving up tea and cakes and soup and more tea until thin strings of yellow dripped from his mouth and he thought his eyeballs were going to explode out of their sockets.</p><p>There was a warm, solid hand between his shoulder blades and a low voice murmuring soothing nothings to him, and then there was a soft, hot flannel pressed into his shaking hand to wipe his mouth.</p><p>Bond walked him back to the couch and brought him a glass of ice chips and then disposed of the evidence of Q’s weakness as though cleaning up sick were in his job description.</p><p>(Q supposed it was, in a decidedly not-going-to-think-about-it sort of way.)</p><p>Bond didn’t ask him if he was alright, and Q thought in that moment he might love James Bond, which was terrifying.</p><p>“We drove back to the Trossachs in the wee hours and left Rae at the bottom of the same tarn where we’d dumped Alain.  Mish said it was romantic, in a way, and that she would have wanted it like that.  I’m not so sure; she never liked getting dirty, and that water is black with tannin, you know?”</p><p>Bond’s answer was to put his arm around Q, who let himself slump by slow degrees against him.</p><p>“We found this old warehouse, half the roof missing, too dodgy for even the junkies, and spliced electrics from a machining shop two doors down.  And then I stole some more money from the same Goliathan arseholes, left myself wide open, and waited for them to bite.  They weren’t nearly as good as they thought they were.  It took me thirty-six hours to find them and another ten to track down the ones they’d hired to kill us.”</p><p>“You set a trap?”</p><p>“Mm, right there in the warehouse.  Three of them came in a black SUV.  So predictable.  I lured them inside while Mish let the air out of their tires.  I offered to give them all the money back, begged them for my life like I was afraid of them.”</p><p>Q paused, remembering the coldness at his center then and the way his thoughts were perfect crystals, cutting across his brain, leading him with a dissociated precision toward the inevitable end.</p><p>“When I saw that Mish was back, I just…killed them.  It was easy enough to rig the blast, and there was no one around to hear it.  I miscalculated the blast radius a little, lost some skin, but otherwise…”</p><p>Q shuddered, and Bond tightened his hold.  He took a deep breath, trying to steady his nerves for what came next.  This was the part he never let himself remember, the part he’d tried over the last ten years to drive from his nightmares.</p><p>“Mish was never the same after that.  They didn’t laugh anymore, couldn’t look at me.  It was like their pilot light had been blown out—there was nothing in their eyes.  I think…”</p><p>Q shook his head.  It was a disservice to Mish’s memory to say what he’d been thinking on and off for years—that ultimately Mish was a lot like Rae and couldn’t stand to live anymore.</p><p>“The truth is, I killed Mish.  Not directly, but…”</p><p>He waggled his head as if trying to figure out a way to make it sound less awful.</p><p>“They were arrested,” Bond prompted, easing his grip a little, giving Q room to breathe.</p><p>Q nodded.  “We hadn’t gone back to the Foundry—too risky.  I’d put the Goliathan arseholes on notice that there’d be hell to pay if there were any further attempts, and then I closed my back door into the company and gave them a security upgrade, free of charge.”</p><p>“We moved into a pay-as-you-go studio in Bathgate and kept our heads down.  I still don’t know what happened, how they tracked us.  We were so careful.  I was out when they nabbed Mish, getting chips for our supper.  I saw the cops putting them in the back of the car from two blocks away.  I just kept walking toward them, like I thought I could blend into the wall or something.</p><p>They drove right past, Mish looking out the window at me, mouth moving.”</p><p>Q swallowed a sob and whispered, “I think they were saying, ‘Run!’”</p><p>He took in a shuddering breath, stomach cramping, and sucked on an ice chip, letting the trickle of cold water down the back of his tongue take most of his attention until his stomach calmed.</p><p>“I leveraged a lawyer with inadvisable online gambling habits into representing Mish without bringing me into it.  He said Mish was refusing to cooperate and that there was talk of bringing Scotland Yard into it.  I was trying to find some way of getting at the lead investigator, DCI Marlebone, had a pretty fair start on turning him, when I was woken from a sound sleep by a pillow over my face.”</p><p>“M?” Bond guessed, the barest of smiles turning up one corner of his mouth.</p><p>Q returned that Spartan smile with one of his own and nodded.  “Yes.  Of course, I didn’t know that at first.  I was put in rendition in one of those dank old bunker cells—you know the ones?”</p><p>“Mm,” Bond agreed, pulling a face.</p><p>“Three days with the lights on, hands chained to a chair, truly humiliating sessions with a bored-looking male nurse and a plastic urinal bottle…”</p><p>“I’m familiar with that particular…method,” Bond said.  Q risked a glance at him and saw a hint of color high up on the cheek he could see in profile.  It occurred to him that Bond knew far more of actual torture than Q had ever been subjected to.</p><p>“She showed up when I was just about ready to crack for want of a toothbrush and clean pants.  I’d disavowed all knowledge of Mish every time they asked about them, and by the time she strolled in in her sensible pumps and three thousand pound skirt suit I felt like I’d rather die than leave that room a free man after what I’d done to Mish.”</p><p>“She had that effect even on people who weren’t in such vulnerable positions,” Bond noted.</p><p>There was a fondness in his voice that Q was almost jealous of, a sense of history, a depth of feeling he wasn’t sure he and Bond shared.  And then he remembered that she’d died in Bond’s arms on a cold chapel floor on a damp Scottish night, and he leaned over to kiss Bond’s temple and the hectic splash of color on his cheek and the corner of his mouth with its rueful memorial smile.</p><p>“I think,” Q said slowly, “that everyone was in a more vulnerable position around her,” and that earned him a ghost of a chuckle.</p><p>“So, M made me the proverbial irrefusable offer—she’d make sure Mish was protected if I came to work for her—and here I am.”</p><p>It wasn’t that simple, and they both knew it.  For one thing, he hadn’t told Bond how Mish had died.</p><p>But gray shadows had stolen over the big space as they’d sat huddled in a diminished pool of waning sun from a skylight overhead, and though it wasn’t yet dark, Q was exhausted, wrung out and feeling weedy inside.  He feared invoking that particular ghost, knowing as he did that Mish was already there, hiding just out of his sight, waiting to remind Q of what he’d done—or failed to do.</p><p>“I should check the financials,” he said, trying to sound assertive and not like he’d just spewed most of the shame of his past onto Bond’s lap.</p><p>“I think we should get some rest.  The numbers can wait a few more hours,” Bond countered, taking his arm from around Q, so he could get up and offer him a hand instead.</p><p>Something twisted in Q’s chest, sending tendrils of watery unease through him.  Despite the invitation he’d made to Bond earlier, Q wasn’t sure he was ready to share a bed—and everything that entailed—with Bond.  His confession had stirred up too many ghosts.  It was like he could catch the tail of Rae’s patchwork hippie skirt disappearing around the corner into the room she’d shared with Alain, and he was very afraid that if he was too quiet, he’d hear Mish’s burbling laugh, that ridiculous, joyous child’s sound they’d made when something delighted them.</p><p>He had nothing to give Bond that wasn’t tarnished by regret and sorrow.  He didn’t want to make love to him a second time if he’d once again be participating from the rafters, half out of his mind and unmoored from himself.</p><p>Bond deserved more than Q had of himself to give these days.</p><p>“Just to rest,” Bond assured him as Q hesitated.</p><p>“Alright,” he agreed, taking Bond’s hand and letting himself be pulled upright and herded toward the bedroom with a solicitous hand at the small of his back.</p><p>Bond left him to change out of his street clothes and returned a few minutes later wearing lounge pants and a tee-shirt, his feet bare and his hands occupied with his go-bag and gun kit, which he left on the floor just inside the door, along with a pair of shoes, as if he might not be staying long.</p><p>Q tried not to take that as an indication of their status, reminding himself that they hadn’t exactly plighted their troth or anything, and anyway, now was not the time nor the Foundry the place for such considerations.</p><p>He slipped into bed on the far side, which he tried not to think of as “Mish’s,” and let Bond have the side nearest the door, suspecting that that would be his preference.</p><p>“Get some rest,” Bond said, smoothing the covers down on his side and sitting up against the headboard with a book in his hand and a pair of reading glasses he’d apparently produced from the ether.</p><p>Q tried not to stare—truly, he did—but the sight of Bond in loungewear and glasses reading—Q strained to see the title, having deposited his glasses on the nightstand already—<em>Catch-22</em>—almost undid all his good intentions about not having sex again.</p><p>Then he was surprised by a jaw-cracking yawn and closed his eyes for a moment.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Home Alone</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The next thing Q knew, Bond’s hand was resting on his chest, and he was saying, “Q, love?  You should get up.”</p><p> </p><p>Disoriented, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and did as suggested, stopping in the bathroom to splash water on his face and run damp fingers through his hair before taking a series of deep breaths and trying to shake off the last of his confusion.</p><p><br/>
He hated napping; it always made his brain feel cotton-stuffed and slow.</p><p> </p><p>The warm glow of the kitchen fixture gave him just enough light to see that Bond had been reading at the end of the couch opposite Q’s usual workspace.</p><p> </p><p>The screen on his laptop was showing bouncing death metal kittens, but when he woke it, there was the information they’d been waiting for.</p><p> </p><p>Q sucked in a harsh breath.</p><p> </p><p>“Someone we know?” Bond asked, sounding pleasant on the surface—a sunny day at the beach—and deadly beneath—sharp teeth, cold eyes, and a nature inured to violence.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m afraid so,” Q said.</p><p> </p><p>Bond rose and came to stand behind the couch, peering over Q’s shoulder.<br/>
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<br/>
“M,” they said at the same time, and then Q said, “Oh,” softly, and Bond loosed a stream of vicious curses in six—possibly seven—languages.</p><p> </p><p>“It can’t be her,” Q said, because someone had to.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was pacing the floor from the couch to the kitchen, his face hard, like an avatar of Ares in a tiger’s cage.  Q could see him calculating the risks for the living, the cost-benefit analysis of assassination in the unblinking blue of his eyes.</p><p> </p><p>When Bond looked up and caught Q watching him, he stopped his pacing and came to stand behind Q again.</p><p> </p><p>Q tilted his head back, as if offering his throat, but really it was so he could see Bond’s face when he repeated, “It isn’t her.”</p><p> </p><p>“Of course not.  She’s dead,” Bond said, the syllables sounding like he’d learned them from a machine.</p><p> </p><p>“Then someone is playing a very dangerous game indeed,” Q said.  “I’m going to find them, and you’re going to kill them, and all shall be well, and all shall be well…”</p><p> </p><p>“…and all manner of things shall be well,” Bond finished, some thawing at the edges where his eyes were crinkling in the crow’s feet Q was coming to love.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s hand brushed the back of his neck, fingers warm and teasing, and then he was rounding the couch and taking a place beside Q and saying, “What do you need?”</p><p> </p><p>Q stifled his first urge, which was to say, “Nothing.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond was a gifted field agent, brilliant at improvising, with a tactician’s mind in the body of a killer, but he was no hacker.</p><p> </p><p>As if catching Q’s train of thought, Bond said, “Forget I asked.  I’ll keep you in tea, shall I, dear?” and headed for the kitchen.</p><p> </p><p>Q shook off a momentary image of Bond in an apron and high heels and nothing else and went back to the financial report to tease at it until he found a thread loose enough to pull.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was as good as his word, keeping a steaming cup at Q’s elbow—well out of the way of the laptop—and occasionally bringing tidbits savory and sweet to tempt him into recharging.</p><p> </p><p>Somewhere in the wee hours, Q gave a crow of triumph and Bond materialized at his elbow in workout gear, a wet yoke at the collar of the loose tank top hinting at his most recent activities. </p><p> </p><p>Even the healthy glow of sweat in the hollow of Bond’s throat couldn’t distract Q from his quarry, however, and he pointed to the screen and said, “I’ve got him.”</p><p> </p><p>“Him?”</p><p> </p><p>“Henry Davis, Senior Data Analyst, Eastern European division.  Worked under Belrus and Arkan in the Bucharest office for a few years, then was transferred to the home office by—”</p><p> </p><p>“M,” Bond finished for him.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes.  You know him?”  Q knew the answer from the calculating look in Bond’s eyes, but he waited while Bond put his words together with a caution that made Q’s belly go cold.</p><p> </p><p>“I remember M referring to him as ‘that pompous prick’ more than once.  She didn’t like him, but she kept him around.  I always had the impression that he was more useful than irritating, which was the way you wanted it to be with her.”</p><p> </p><p>“Mm, yes, you wouldn’t want an inverse proportion,” Q noted, feeling another clutch of cold in his gut.</p><p> </p><p>Another ghostly chuckle, as if Bond were dredging them up from a past when he’d still been capable of laughing.</p><p> </p><p>“So, what changed to turn him into a traitor?” Q wondered.</p><p> </p><p>Bond shrugged.  “The obvious answer is Mallory.”</p><p> </p><p>“I could probably access his personnel file without getting caught, but it’s a risk.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond was shaking his head before Q finished his sentence.</p><p> </p><p>“No, this is the sort of thing one does in person.”</p><p> </p><p>Q took in Bond’s expression, the set of his shoulders, his stance; everything about him spoke of leashed violence, and it made him shiver in a delicious way that he was hard pressed to disguise.</p><p> </p><p>“Well, then, I guess you’re up, 007,” Q said, very deliberately enunciating the title.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s smile was predatory and salacious both, and this time Q didn’t bother to hide his reaction.</p><p> </p><p>“Shall I have you in my…ear?” Bond asked, stalking closer.</p><p> </p><p>“You can have me wherever you want me,” Q answered, smiling to show that he knew just how predictable the response was.  He’d always been pants at flirting, and anyway, Bond was gifted enough in that department for the both of them.</p><p> </p><p>Bond surprised Q then by pulling him in for an embrace, his lips grazing Q’s ear as he whispered, “Later,” and wrapped his arms around Q’s shoulders.</p><p> </p><p>It took Q a moment to get with the program, but then his arms were around Bond’s waist and he pressed his nose to the sliver of skin expose along Bond’s shoulder where it met his neck and was pleased to feel him shiver in response.</p><p> </p><p>They stood there, just holding each other, for what felt like a long time but must only have been a minute or two, and there was real regret in Bond’s eyes when he pulled away, saying, “I have to go.”</p><p> </p><p>“I can have a car sent round,” Q offered, and Bond gave him a searching look.</p><p> </p><p>“Secure, under a name I’ve never used before, no way to trace it back to me or us.” He rattled these facts off as though reading the nutritional information from a box of cereal, and Bond smiled, tired but approving.</p><p> </p><p>Q felt warm to the soles of his feet.  It was a reaction he was beginning to find irritating; he’d lived for 33 years without needing anyone’s approval, tacit or otherwise, and he wasn’t about to start craving Bond’s approbation like some sort of reward for being good.</p><p> </p><p>He <em>was</em> good.  Better than.  He could wreak his own havoc without leaving the Foundry. </p><p> </p><p>“Be safe,” he said to Bond, and Bond’s smile turned rueful.</p><p> </p><p>“Then at least come back in more or less one piece?” Q modified.</p><p> </p><p>Bond grunted and gave a two-fingered salute over his shoulder as he strolled toward the bedroom, presumably to change.</p><p> </p><p>Q called the special number for his management firm and arranged to have a late-model Audi delivered to the secondary residence he’d rented years ago for just such an exigency.</p><p> </p><p>When Bond returned a few minutes later looking somehow elegant in jeans and another Henley—this one a deeper blue that transformed his eyes to chips of Arctic glacier—Q gave him the address and said, “Ten minutes.”</p><p> </p><p>“Impressive,” Bond said with a little smirk of self-mockery.  “Is there anything you can’t do, I wonder?”</p><p> </p><p>“I can’t cook,” Q joked, “And I don’t like to be restrained,” not joking at all.</p><p> </p><p>“Noted,” Bond said, sparing him an understanding look.</p><p> </p><p>“For me?” he went on, nodding at the objects on the kitchen counter nearest the door.</p><p> </p><p>“The usual,” Q affirmed, handing Bond the earwig, a pen that doubled as a distress beacon, a hand-held laser cutter disguised as a tablet stylus, and a cell phone.</p><p> </p><p>Bond raised his eyebrows as he stowed this last in the jacket he’d retrieved from the hook beside the door.</p><p> </p><p>“Just a phone, so I can keep track of you,” Q explained.  “Secure and untraceable.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond nodded.  “If you don’t hear from me in twelve hours, assume I’ve been compromised and go to ground elsewhere.”</p><p> </p><p>“Understood,” Q said, suddenly formal.  There would be no goodbye kiss, Q decided.  They weren’t figures from a pre-Raphaelite painting.</p><p> </p><p>Bond touched his cheek, just a brush of his fingertips, and said, “Take care,” before glancing at the surveillance panel and then slipping out the door.</p><p> </p><p>Q felt a shiver trace its fingers across the small of his back, and he swallowed a sigh as he turned toward the kitchen to make his own cup of tea.</p><p> </p><p>Pushing Bond’s mission out of his mind for now—it would take him eight hours to travel to London and track down Davis—Q retrieved another laptop from the safe in the electrics room.  This one was obviously used, sporting metallic stickers for club bands and a faded logo from a defunct video games store.  He’d built it himself, done all his important work on it, including hacking Goliathan.</p><p> </p><p>A more sentimental Q had left it behind rather than destroy it when he and Rae and Mish had had to run.</p><p> </p><p>Then, he couldn’t have risked it falling into the wrong hands, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to get rid of it, either.</p><p> </p><p>His older self, the MI6 quartermaster, was appalled by the breach of security, but some small part of him was glad to see his old friend, and not just because it reminded him of happier days.</p><p> </p><p>No, the badass rig in his hands was going to come in handy, let him do things even the home office system wouldn’t allow.</p><p> </p><p>Q was about to do something reckless, maybe in the name of love but most definitely in the spirit of vengeance.</p><p> </p><p>He was going to resurrect Dorian, the once and future king of hackers, a decidedly anarchic breed who had even so known better than to question his supremacy. </p><p> </p><p>If there was any information on the dark web pertaining to Davis, et al, Dorian had a much better chance of finding it than even the Quartermaster of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.</p><p> </p><p>The risks were minimal after all this time:  The people who’d most like to put Dorian in the ground had by and large found other fish to fry.  (Naturally, he’d kept tabs on them over the years.)  Those few who’d been too inquisitive had discovered themselves on the wrong end of extremely invasive audits, thanks in no small part to M’s considerable patronage.</p><p> </p><p>If Dorian were threatened by anyone or anything, it wouldn’t be the people who’d manufactured his earlier destruction.</p><p> </p><p>It would be the new kids on the block, the Johnny-come-latelies with an ax to grind, preferably on the bones of an ancient (to them) legend.</p><p> </p><p>Dorian had been notorious for burying his secrets, but unlike his eponymous portrait he hadn’t, in fact, been immortal.  Just lucky.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
Until he really wasn’t.</p><p> </p><p>Some would see that as a weakness. </p><p> </p><p>Others—the smart ones—would recognize that anyone who could go underground and off the grid as thoroughly as he had and then suddenly reappear a decade later wasn’t the type to be fucked with.</p><p> </p><p>Time would tell.</p><p> </p><p>Q had weighed the cost of bringing unwanted attention to his old alias—and, thereby, potentially his current one, as well—against the benefits of what Dorian could do on the dark web.</p><p> </p><p>“Dark web it is,” Q breathed, stroking his sixty-four-bit key into the dialogue box with an almost sexual thrill tickling the base of his spine.</p><p> </p><p>At the home office, time was frequently Q’s enemy:  an agent had only seconds to escape a building before detonation; the armory required the latest upgrades to field test weapons as soon as humanly possible; the budget office needed a line item report yesterday.</p><p> </p><p>He never lost himself to time at work.</p><p> </p><p>Swimming the dark channels as Dorian was another experience entirely, a fact Q was only reminded of when his cell phone rang, bringing him up out of the depths to hear, “I’m ready,” and then the dial tone as Bond disconnected.</p><p> </p><p>Q switched laptops, opened the comms suite, and put on his wireless headset, “You made good time.”</p><p> </p><p>“Copy,” Bond answered, affirming that their connection was live and clear.</p><p> </p><p>Q enjoyed and disliked this part of his job in equal measure. </p><p> </p><p>On the one hand, his imagination supplied images for what his ears were picking up—the brush of cloth against a doorframe as Bond slipped into a suddenly unlocked door; the distant tinny sound of a television in another room; a furnace switching on.</p><p> </p><p>On the other, this was also the held-breath moment when everything could go to hell, especially as, in this case, the sum total of their mission intel was whatever recon Bond had managed before he chose to infiltrate the target’s home.</p><p> </p><p>Q used the tech in Bond’s earwig to pick up live wifi signals and was gratified to have Davis’ home security system on his screen in a matter of moments.</p><p> </p><p>“He’s on the first floor in a den.  There’s a woman asleep in a bedroom at the front of the house, second floor.  No one else seems to be present in the home.”</p><p> </p><p>There were no cameras in the cellar—block windows, he noted from an exterior view—but it was unlikely there’d be anyone down there at this hour, and Davis’ personnel file said his two children were grown and living elsewhere.</p><p> </p><p>The sound of the television grew more distinct as Bond moved toward the source of the noise.  He could clearly hear canned laughter and the unmistakable fruity tones of John Cleese.</p><p> </p><p>Then there was a breathing silence and a choked off exclamation.</p><p> </p><p>“You must have been expecting this,” Bond said, and Q’s fancy supplied the image of him holding Davis at gunpoint in his favorite chair.</p><p> </p><p>“007?  Good god, what in the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”  Davis’ voice raised in volume.</p><p> </p><p>Bond tsked and said, “You wouldn’t want to wake Lorraine,” and Davis hissed, “You’re finished, Bond.  When Mallory hears of this—”</p><p> </p><p>“Is that who you answer to?” Bond asked.</p><p> </p><p>Davis’ tone was incredulous: “You bloody well know it is, Bond.  As do you, I might remind you.”</p><p> </p><p>He sounded not so much terrified for his life as put out by the interruption of his show.</p><p> </p><p>“Ask him if he’s been to the Grenadines lately,” Q said, grasping a tenuous thread he’d been worrying away at in the financials.</p><p> </p><p>Bond repeated the question, injecting it with considerably more menace, and Davis’, “What are you talking about?” was textbook confusion.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t think he’s our man,” Q suggested quietly.  Bond, of course, didn’t answer.</p><p> </p><p>He interrogated Davis for the span of five more tense minutes and then said, “Sorry to have bothered you.  I’ll see myself out.  Be sure to tell M you saw me, will you?”</p><p> </p><p>“You can be assured, Commander Bond, that M will hear about <em>every</em>thing,” Davis answered, sounding once more like the stuffed shirt Q imagined him to be.</p><p> </p><p>That was good.  If M were involved—still a strong possibility, given how insidiously deep the layers of this intrigue seemed to go—Bond’s appearance at Davis’ house would be marked as a threat and put the enemy on notice.</p><p> </p><p>If M weren’t involved, at least he’d know that Bond was still alive and pursuing the mole.</p><p> </p><p>“Anything you’d like me to pick up while I’m here.  Curry, dry-cleaning, latte?” Bond quipped as the Audi engine hummed into life in the background.</p><p><br/>
“Just come home,” Q answered, realizing almost immediately that in his distraction—he’d already pulled the Dorian laptop over and resumed tugging at threads to see what he might unravel—he’d just suggested that the Foundry (and, by extension, Q himself) was ‘home’ for Bond.</p><p> </p><p>“Sounds lovely,” Bond purred—honestly, how he managed it on a sterile comms line from 650 kilometers away, Q didn’t know, but it gave him a shiver nonetheless. </p><p> </p><p>Bond chuckled as if he knew what his voice did to Q and then disconnected them.</p><p> </p><p>Q’s nerves were jangling, too much caffeine and not enough food ripping away whatever grounding they’d had.  His eyelids felt coated in sand, and every time he blinked, tears formed at the corners of his eyes.  He should eat something, he knew, and get some sleep, but there was work to be done, and he didn’t think he could manage to settle until Bond was sharing a roof with him once more.</p><p> </p><p>Q was slumped blearily on the couch watching the progress bar on a program move in infinitesimal increments when Bond let himself in, which shouldn’t have been possible, given the hidden, biometric press-plate.</p><p> </p><p>If he weren’t strung out on coding and shaking from caffeine jitters, Q might have made more of a fuss.  As it was, his half-mocking, “Impressive,” was ruined by a yawn, and even Bond’s fond chuckle didn’t raise a reaction in him.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>God, but he was tired.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ve got something,” he said, not bothering to hide the Dorian laptop.</p><p> </p><p>Bond dropped onto the seat beside him, divested him of the laptop, turned his face towards his own, and kissed him for a long, long minute, until Q wasn’t sure he wouldn’t pass out for lack of breath.</p><p> </p><p>“Miss me?” he panted as Bond at last let him up for air.</p><p> </p><p>“Mmm,” Bond answered, and that did get a rise out of Q.</p><p> </p><p>Another yawn, however, this one wide enough that his jaw cracked audibly, ruined the mood.</p><p> </p><p>“Let’s go to bed,” Bond suggested, closing the Dorian laptop without so much as an inquiring eyebrow at its juvenile decorations.</p><p> </p><p>“To sleep,” Q clarified, and Bond laughed again, a short, sharp burst of air. </p><p> </p><p>“Even I have my limits,” he said, levering himself off of the couch and offering Q a hand, which it turned out he needed:  His knee joints weren’t thrilled about the way he’d been sitting for…he chanced a look at the Mickey Mouse wall clock Mish had loved…gods, it was sixteen hours, give or take, and he’d only been up for tea and the loo.</p><p> </p><p>Q knew his clothes were fusty, his hair greasy, and his glasses smudged.  He could only imagine what his mouth had tasted like when Bond had kissed him.</p><p> </p><p>None of that seemed to matter to Bond, though, as he followed Q into the bedroom and began to take off his clothes with the crisp efficiency of a field agent who learned long ago to take sleep wherever—and with whomever—he could find it.</p><p> </p><p>When Bond was down to his briefs, Q was still standing at the foot of the bed, swaying a little and trying to remember what it was he had to tell Bond.</p><p> </p><p>Bond broke his concentration by skimming his hands—and his shirt—up his sides, stripping him with practiced care and guiding him in his boxers and socks to the bed, where he took his hands away only long enough to pull down the sheet and duvet.</p><p> </p><p>“In you get,” Bond said, gentling Q toward the mattress and removing his glasses, which Q watched him put on the nightstand.</p><p> </p><p>It was the last thing Q remembered.  He didn’t feel the bed dip as Bond slipped in beside him, didn’t feel Bond’s presence, the heat of his body, or hear the gentle susurration of his breath.</p><p> </p><p>Those things came to him in a slow wave of awareness hours—or eons—later, as he came up out of a dream of Mish pounding his hands bloody against a thick plate of glass as two faceless men in grey suits hulked toward him from the shadows behind him.</p><p> </p><p>Q was screaming Mish’s name over and over in the dream, but he’d trained himself out of thrashing and murmuring in his sleep long before he’d been living rough on the streets.  Even as a child, silence had been a life skill and suffering just another thing you went through alone.</p><p> </p><p>So it was that he could lay there boxing his breath to get his heartrate down and gradually becoming aware of Bond, still asleep, at his side.</p><p> </p><p>He turned his head on the pillow to take in the brutal, beautiful face, its hard lines softened, the wry mouth relaxed.</p><p> </p><p>He wanted to touch those lips, feel Bond’s warm breath against the tips of his fingers, but Q knew better than to wake him that way; he had no desire to discover what Bond’s reflexes were like firsthand.</p><p> </p><p>Instead, he contented himself with matching his breath to Bond’s own until sleep tugged at his lids again, and he let himself doze off.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Home Free</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When he woke again—this time from dreams he did not remember—Bond was the one doing the watching, propped up on his elbow, looking down at Q from less than a foot away.</p><p> </p><p>“Morning,” Bond rumbled, smile lighting his eyes up.</p><p> </p><p>“Morning,” Q echoed, staring his fill.</p><p> </p><p>Bond reached across the scant space between them to run his fingers through Q’s wild tangle of hair.</p><p> </p><p>“Ugh, I need a shower,” Q said, realizing as he spoke that his breath must be hideous.</p><p> </p><p>Bond didn’t seem to care, though, leaning over to tease his lips into a long, wet, open-mouthed kiss that made him half-hard in his stale boxers.</p><p> </p><p>“Mmmph,” he tried at last, and Bond let him up laughing and said, “I’ll give you a minute and then join you,” as if they showered together every day.</p><p> </p><p>He took the promised minute to brush his teeth and use the facilities and then stepped into the shower.  It was a walk-in shower with frosted glass doors and two shower heads; he’d designed it that way during the planning phase, so he and Mish could shower together in comfort.</p><p> </p><p>Now, stepping under the soothing spray from the wide rain-style head, Q put Mish firmly out of his mind.</p><p> </p><p>It was easier to do with the vision of masculine strength crossing the tiled floor with confident strides.  Bond was naked, naturally, and supremely unselfconscious as he slid the door open and stepped under the unoccupied showerhead.</p><p> </p><p>He tipped his head back, letting water slide over his cropped hair and down the angles of his boxer’s face.</p><p> </p><p>Q wanted to sip the water from his chin and held himself back only with some effort.  They were here to get clean, after all; there’d be time for dirtying each other up later.</p><p> </p><p>As if Bond had sensed the direction of his thoughts, he opened his blue eyes and fixed Q with an avid, hungry gaze.</p><p> </p><p>“Shall I?” Bond said, holding up the shampoo bottle Q had been too distracted to see him picking up.</p><p> </p><p>“Please,” Q said, though his voice came out a bit strangled.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s fingers were gentle and firm on Q’s scalp, and he closed his eyes and let the shivers cascade down his spine with the hot water and shampoo suds.</p><p> </p><p>“Tilt back,” Bond said, cupping his hand around the nape of Q’s neck to support him there.</p><p> </p><p>He wanted to moan at that simple, thoughtful contact.</p><p> </p><p>He couldn’t hide his erection, which was brushing against Bond with every deep breath, but Q wasn’t going to be ruled by it, either.<br/><br/></p><p><br/>When his hair was suds-free, he opened his eyes and said, “May I return the favor?”</p><p> </p><p>“Please,” Bond rumbled, giving Q his back.</p><p> </p><p>Bond relaxed into his touch in a way that was immensely gratifying, and Q felt a treacherous warmth spreading behind his breastbone, heat having nothing to do with sex and everything to do with trust…and love.</p><p> </p><p>He took in a breath of steam, choked on it, and dropped his hands long enough to recover himself.</p><p> </p><p>In the meantime, Bond had rinsed his head free of shampoo and was waiting with the sandalwood soap already in his hand.  He didn’t ask this time, just raised an eyebrow, and Q nodded, still a little tight in the throat from his panic choking.</p><p> </p><p>The soap was a mistake, he realized in an instant:  Bond must have searched it out of a drawer for his own shower at some time in the past few days, and Q hadn’t noticed it.</p><p> </p><p>Now, it filled the shower with heady associations, especially as Bond’s hand slipped between his legs from behind and sought out his most sensitive places.  Q wanted to slap his hands to the wall and spread his legs like a wanton, but behind his closed eyes was a film-reel of Mish’s hands, Mish’s soft sounds of pleasure, Mish’s mouth on his cock…</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s hand moved away, and Q was so far lost in his memories that it took a long moment to realize he wasn’t touching him at all.</p><p> </p><p>When he opened his eyes to look back over his shoulder, Bond was standing with his feet slightly apart, hands at his side, in a position Q recognized as preparatory, as if he expected to be attacked…to be hurt.</p><p> </p><p>Q turned and said, “Bond,” and Bond shook his head.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s alright.  I’ll just finish, shall I, and then we can have breakfast.”</p><p> </p><p>Q’s eyes skidded away from Bond’s face, which was as carefully neutral and prepared as the rest of him.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m sorry,” Q said, moving past him to exit the shower.<br/><br/></p><p><br/>“Don’t be sorry,” Bond said, stopping Q with a finger and thumb braceletting his wrist.  “I want you to be sure.”</p><p> </p><p>Q swallowed around the painful lump of regret clogging his throat and nodded spasmodically, glad for the water on his face to hide the way his eyes were tearing up.</p><p> </p><p>He felt like ten kinds of fool, but that foolish feeling was followed by a flash of irritation at Bond for bringing it about.</p><p> </p><p>Then guilt washed over him as he realized he was upset with Bond for something that was in no way his fault; he couldn’t be blamed for not knowing where all of Q’s ghosts were, especially when Q hadn’t finished telling him about the most haunting one of all.</p><p> </p><p>Vowing to put things to rights sooner rather than later, Q dried off, returned to his room and dressed, and then went out to the kitchen to make coffee and scrounge the cupboards and fridge for something that might be made into breakfast.</p><p> </p><p>Mickey Mouse told him it was after ten in the morning; he could hardly fathom it.  He hadn’t slept like that for longer than he could remember.</p><p> </p><p>Bond padded out after him looking loose and easy in a blue tee-shirt and lounge pants.</p><p> </p><p>“I should pick up a few things today,” he said, passing Q at the kitchen counter and running a hand across his lower back as he did.  “You’ll get tired of seeing me in this.”</p><p> </p><p>Q didn’t think he’d ever get tired of watching James Bond stroll around the Foundry in casual wear, but he didn’t demur.  </p><p> </p><p>Besides, they needed fresh produce and other perishables.  The management firm had kept the kitchen well-stocked with canned and boxed goods, but naturally, they hadn’t anticipated Q showing up there for the first time in ten years.</p><p> </p><p>He considered the news he had to share with Bond and weighed it against the opportunity to go out, have a hot meal together, and get some shopping done.</p><p> </p><p>A few hours out from under the suffocating weight of his memories might do him a world of good, and anyway, it wasn’t like he had the ultimate clue, more a suggestion of a line that might lead to a suspicion.</p><p> </p><p>“Why don’t we go somewhere for breakfast and then do some shopping?” Q suggested, and Bond smiled, scanning his face as though looking for tells before saying, “I’d like that,” apparently unfazed by Q’s sudden change of demeanor.</p><p> </p><p>Q followed him to the bedroom to change into street clothes.  Bond had slipped on his jeans and was pulling his blue Henley from the closet when Q gathered his courage and put a hand on his arm to stop him.</p><p> </p><p>Bond turned the weight of his gaze—and his magnificent, bare chest—toward Q at the touch, his expression patient, eyes giving nothing away.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m sorry,” he said.</p><p> </p><p>“You said that before, and I told you, there’s nothing to be—”</p><p> </p><p>Q interrupted him with a kiss.  Bond hesitated—Q could feel him thinking—and then softened his mouth and tilted his head, letting Q deepen the kiss, letting him lead Bond by the wrist to the bed, sitting on the edge while he undid Bond’s fly and slid his jeans and pants down far enough to get his mouth on Bond’s cock.</p><p> </p><p>Bond threaded his fingers through Q’s hair, flexing them until Q whined a little and took more of his cock into his mouth.</p><p> </p><p>Bond released a plosive breath and his hips twitched, driving himself deeper.  Q relaxed his throat, remembering how it worked as he did it, glorying in the weight of Bond’s cock on his tongue and the helpless, bitten-off curses he spilled as he tightened his fingers and tried not to thrust.</p><p> </p><p>Q made an approving sound, wanting Bond to let go, to fuck his face, wanting his throat raw and aching, his lungs pounding.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was careful, though, easing his grip on Q’s hair and murmuring, “Q,” in warning, and “Oh,” before spilling down his throat in a scalding stream that seemed to go on and on.</p><p> </p><p>Q swallowed what he could, felt the overflow trickling out at the corners of his mouth, but before he could pull away and clean himself up, Bond had stepped back to shuck his jeans and briefs and push Q backward the bed, hands busy at the waistband of Q’s sleep pants, mouth hot as a furnace on Q’s cock.</p><p> </p><p>Q cried out, hips bucking off the bed, and it took only a slide of Bond’s tongue and a moment of suction before he was coming, staccato, breathless sounds punched out of him by the force of his orgasm.</p><p> </p><p>Panting and swearing, mouth tasting of Bond, he opened his eyes to see Bond on his knees between his spread thighs.  Bond’s mouth was red and on his cheeks were twin hectic spots of color.  His eyes were fierce with pleasure and possessiveness, his hands firm and hot where they caressed his inner thighs.</p><p> </p><p>“God, I want to fuck you until you feel my cock in the back of your throat,” Bond said casually, as if observing the time of day or suggesting an item to add to their shopping list, but in that rich, low come-fuck-me voice that never failed to get a response out of Q.</p><p> </p><p>Q swore he felt his cock twitch, and he moaned at the image of Bond bending him in half, driving into him until he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel anything but Bond’s cock riving him open.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes, please,” he murmured, throwing an arm over his eyes to block out what little light was coming in from the hallway.</p><p> </p><p>“Oh, dear, I seem to have worn you out,” Bond mocked, and Q raised his forearm far enough to watch Bond rise gracefully from between his spread legs like some sort of pornographic, latter- day god of debauchery.</p><p> </p><p>The rear view was even more spectacular than the fore, in that case, and Q abandoned his intention of taking a nap in favor of watching Bond wander to the bathroom.</p><p> </p><p>A few moments later, Q found the energy to get back on his own feet and follow Bond, who stepped over to give him room at the vanity, where they brushed their teeth in companionable quiet, Bond’s eyes catching Q’s in the mirror over the sink, a certain twinkle in them that suggested he was tickled about something.</p><p> </p><p>“What?” he asked as he turned the water off.</p><p> </p><p>“I like this,” Bond said, shrugging, as if he hadn’t just rearranged Q’s world with this happy, domestic little scene.</p><p> </p><p>“So do I,” he admitted, feeling suddenly a lot more naked.<br/><br/><br/></p><p>“Good,” Bond murmured, dropping a kiss between Q’s shoulder blades as he moved past him back into the main bedroom.<br/><br/></p><p><br/>They dressed quickly, though Q paused every now and then to watch Bond slip into his Henley or do up the fly of his jeans.</p><p> </p><p>Q had never been among those who fetishized the double-Os.  He had more than enough first-hand experience with them to know that they were all too human, despite the shark’s eyes and the talent for killing.</p><p> </p><p>But he realized only now that seeing Bond like this, over the course of their mission thus far, was a revelation.</p><p> </p><p>Yes, Bond was attractive; that was like observing that the sun was hot or water wet.</p><p> </p><p>But Bond like this, easy in his skin, casually affectionate, smiling and quipping and cooking and making endless cups of tea?</p><p> </p><p>Q wouldn’t have imagined it, and now he didn’t have to. </p><p> </p><p>“What?” it was Bond’s turn to ask, a quizzical smile curling up one corner of his mouth.</p><p> </p><p>“Was I staring?” Q asked.</p><p><br/>“Mm.”</p><p> </p><p>“I was just thinking that I could get used to this—us—like this.  Just…”  He waved his hand to take in the whole of their domestic life thus far, explosions, assassins, and traitors notwithstanding.</p><p> </p><p>“Not to ruin the mood, but it wasn’t long ago you were crawling out of your skin here,” Bond observed, no trace of judgment in his voice. “What changed?”</p><p> </p><p>Q was tempted to say <em>you</em>, to fluff him off with a pat answer, to flirt his way to breakfast and ignore the tension Bond’s words had reignited in his chest.</p><p> </p><p>But that’s not what Q wanted.  He wanted to come to Bond free of ghosts.</p><p> </p><p>He wasn’t there yet; he wasn’t fool enough to believe that good fucking and a sweet follow-up were enough to change him entirely.</p><p> </p><p>But it was a start that he <em>wanted</em> to be different, wasn’t it? </p><p> </p><p>“I want this,” Q said simply, at last.  “I’m not ready to have it.  You deserve better than the parts of me I can give to you piecemeal.  But I want you—us.”</p><p> </p><p>“Good,” Bond said after a long pause, wherein he simply looked at Q, scanning him as if for a secret code.  And that was all.</p><p> </p><p>Q wanted to pretend that he was hurt, but he couldn’t be—he’d be a hypocrite to blame Bond for caution when Q himself was well aware what a snarl of traps waited to snare the unsuspecting traveler in the precincts of his heart.</p><p> </p><p>“Breakfast?” he said brightly, not changing the subject at all, and Bond smiled, that genuine, warm expression that transformed his face, and they left the Foundry and walked together down the streets of Edinburgh like two people in the early days of some profound and life-altering love.</p><p> </p><p>Over breakfast, they talked of this and that, carefully avoiding anything painful or significant, and it was in the pause between one topic (the Hebrides in summer) and another (a mutual appreciation for Swedish slow TV) that Q realized he knew very little about Bond despite having read (illicitly) every word of his complete personnel file.</p><p> </p><p>Of course, now was not the time nor place to delve into the unknowns, but despite his head knowing that, Q’s stomach still dropped, and he found he didn’t want to finish what was left of his breakfast.<br/><br/></p><p><br/>Bond, scanning his face, took in the change, a subtle shift in his own demeanor signaling his recognition.</p><p> </p><p>He didn’t ask, however—a habit Q had appreciated until just then, when he realized Bond’s lack of prying might also indicate an unwillingness to commit to knowing the answers to the questions he wasn’t asking.</p><p> </p><p>Then he shook himself internally and said, “Shall we go shopping?”</p><p> </p><p>“Let’s,” Bond answered lightly, letting Q pay and then leading them out of the restaurant and back out into the weak early afternoon sun.</p><p> </p><p>The air was cool but not unpleasantly so, and the traffic in that part of town wasn’t heavy, so the air was mostly fresh and the pace somewhat sedate.  They strolled for several blocks without saying more than a few words—one or the other of them observing something and sharing it.<br/><br/><br/></p><p>It was comfortable, almost familiar, and as Q had never had that sort of life before, the familiarity felt…strange.</p><p> </p><p>He snorted at himself for finding drama where there was none and picked up the pace a little, hoping that—</p><p> </p><p>“Yes!” he crowed, gesturing triumphantly at a narrow storefront wedged in between a butcher and a podiatrist’s office. </p><p> </p><p>L.M. Spence, Tailor, was painted in precise gold letters against a black background.  At one end of the sign, a hare in mid-leap escaped the snapping jaws of an elongated fox.</p><p> </p><p>“The family has been in business uninterrupted for three hundred years,” Q explained.  “I used to come here just to gawp at the flash suits in the window.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s expression indicated a certain disbelief.</p><p><br/>“Oh, not for me!” Q affirmed.  “At the time, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in such guff.  But secretly, I wondered what was in the suit bags that emerged from behind that door.”</p><p> </p><p>In said window was an ensemble that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a London runway during Men’s Fashion Week.</p><p> </p><p>“Shall we find out?” Bond asked, crooking his elbow so Q might thread his arm through it.</p><p> </p><p>“Let’s,” Q beamed, leading the way.</p><p> </p><p>Thankfully for Q, M hadn’t asked where Dorian’s ill-gotten gains had gone, and Q hadn’t told.  Money had never been an object or, really, an interest for Q since he’d turned over a new leaf and become a member of MI-6.</p><p> </p><p>He’d funneled most of what he’d made as Dorian into this charity or that, funding scholarships and community centers and domestic violence shelters—the sorts of programs that may have prevented him from having to leave home at 15.</p><p> </p><p>But the money that remained he’d invested wisely, and he’d not had much occasion to spend beyond purchasing his flat some years before.  The Foundry ran on an endowment fund he’d set up before he’d been recruited by Her Majesty’s hounds, so really, he had money to burn if he liked.</p><p> </p><p>He could think of little he’d rather spend it on than the suit that Bond was just then modeling while Geralt, a waifish young man with enormous glasses and precise, deft fingers, made adjustments with pins and touched Bond in intimate places without any indication that he even noticed his proximity to glory.</p><p> </p><p>Bond, for his part, stood patiently, eyes watching Q with quizzical good humor as Q wandered up and down the narrow shop looking at this hat and these gloves and holding up one tie and then another.</p><p> </p><p>He left without putting a thing on account, which Bond asked him about once they were out on the street, the chit for Bond’s suit in his back pocket.</p><p> </p><p>“Sometimes, the dream is worth more than the reality of it,” he explained.  “It’s enough that I’ll get to see you in one of Laurence’s suits.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond gave him a searching look but let it go, and they wandered down to the next clothing shop, this one sportier, where Bond picked up more Henleys, jeans, trainers, and undergarments.</p><p> </p><p>At a third shop, they found him a jacket and one for Q, which Bond had made him try on.  It wasn’t his thing at all, but he had to admit that he looked good in it, and the heat in Bond’s eyes as he watched Q model it was enough to convince Q to give it a try.</p><p> </p><p>When they finally left the grocery store, the sun was going down, and the streets between the lighted shops were canyons of shadow.  They took a cab back to the restaurant where they’d begun their day and walked from there.  By mutual if silent agreement, Q carried most of the packages, so Bond could keep his gun hand free.</p><p> </p><p>It was probably an unnecessary measure, but as they lived by the old chestnut about safe versus sorry, Q didn’t complain, and despite the complete lack of incident on the short walk back to the Foundry, he still felt relief when he closed the door behind them and set the bags down inside the door.</p><p> </p><p>“Hungry?” Bond asked, and Q shrugged.  His nerves had tightened on the walk home, and uneasy fingers were stirring his guts.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll make us something light, then,” Bond suggested as Q disappeared into the electrics room to retrieve his laptops.</p><p> </p><p>It was time he shared with Bond what he’d learned.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Homeschooled</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In point of fact, they probably should have been working at the problem all along, but Q felt they’d deserved a little break, and anyway, theirs was the next move, so they had the luxury of a little time if they wanted to spend it catching their breath.</p><p> </p><p>When Bond joined him a few minutes later with tea and a crudité plate, Q had already pulled up the file he wanted to show Bond, but before he could give him that information, he had some explaining to do.</p><p> </p><p>Telling Bond about Dorian was both more difficult and easier than Q had expected.</p><p> </p><p>He’d been afraid of how Bond would take his younger alter-ego, a man whose confidence bordered on arrogance and who’d willfully earned enemies in the darkest corners of the cyber-world because he believed he was better than anyone else at what he did.</p><p> </p><p>He should have known that Bond wouldn’t blink at that.  Who was James Bond, after all, if not a legendary figure built out of perceptions and half-truths founded on a shrouded and intimidating reality?</p><p> </p><p>But sharing Dorian with Bond meant talking again about Alain and Rae and Mish, and those memories so recently churned to the surface were unsettling in the extreme.  He heard his voice shaking as he talked about how his three friends had buttressed Dorian’s identity, how Rae, in particular, had helped build the narrative and how Mish, precious, gorgeous Mish, had supported him even when he worried that he’d go too far.</p><p> </p><p>“They trusted you because you <em>are</em> the best,” Bond said, the surety in his voice some balm for the sting of his words—Q didn’t feel like he’d been the best, and he certainly didn’t believe Mish should have trusted him.</p><p> </p><p>“Mish died because they trusted me,” Q said softly, his voice a hoarse whisper, throat tight with unshed tears.</p><p> </p><p>He shook his head, gesturing at the screen.  “Anyway, I resurrected Dorian, figuring I could lure some of his old nemeses out of the woodwork, and sure enough, two scurried into the light.”</p><p> </p><p>He gestured to a username, Codex01000010.  “This one wasn’t very well-known back when Dorian was first on the scene.  They mostly manipulated currency exchanges, small-time stuff, skimming off what they could from people who wouldn’t notice the difference.”</p><p> </p><p>The other username, SweetEvil999, “is a hacktivist, big on environmental stuff—taking down power grids, disrupting Big Energy companies, hacking nuclear power plants to show how dangerous they are, that sort of thing.  Still, she’s got the chops if she ever wanted to come after Dorian—me, I mean.”</p><p> </p><p>“Neither of them has any reason to know who you are now, do they?  And what would their motive be, precisely—revenge?”</p><p> </p><p>Q had begun nodding at Bond’s first question.  “No, right.  They didn’t know me well back then, and they certainly couldn’t know who I’ve become…But they came sniffing around as soon as Dorian started making noise again, and I have to think that can’t be a coincidence.  I can’t think why they’d want revenge; we didn’t interact much in the old days, and I definitely didn’t do anything to them to merit revenge.  We mostly ran different games and only bumped into each other, so to speak, occasionally.”</p><p> </p><p>Q thought for a bit.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
“If they were working for our mole, they’d have to be in it for the money, I’d think.”</p><p> </p><p>“How would our mole come to know of either of these hackers?” Bond asked, his tone patient.  He was focused and methodical, characteristics Q admired.  He could see how lethal an interrogator Bond must prove, particularly if his relentlessness were coupled with ruthlessness.</p><p> </p><p>Ignoring a frisson of desire, Q said, “They must be known to our cyber-terrorism division.  I don’t know what Codex has been up to, but 999 has been prolific.  She hacked a nuclear reactor in Iran a few years ago, made a big international mess.  The CIA was impossible about it—I remember Pavel and Chu complaining endlessly about them at the time.”</p><p> </p><p>“This 999 doesn’t seem like the sort to sideline in espionage, does she?” Bond asked, narrowing the possibilities.</p><p> </p><p>Q shook his head.  “No, she’s always been pretty committed to her causes.”  He saw where Bond was leading him.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll focus on Codex, then, see what more I can find.  I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to dig up their real identity, though.  They’ve had a decade to get better at their craft, and I have no reason to think they haven’t.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond spread his hands.  “You can but try,” he agreed.  “And I’ll keep you in tea and savories, shall I?”</p><p> </p><p>Q smiled.  “You’re my hero,” and Bond gave him a wry smirk and disappeared from Q’s narrowed line of sight.</p><p> </p><p>Focused as he was on the task at hand, Q might have stayed in one position for the rest of that night and into the next  morning but for Bond, who eventually took the laptop from him, pulled him up by both hands, and made him walk several laps of the Foundry to get the circulation going again.</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t have to do it all at once,” Bond chided him. </p><p> </p><p>“The sooner I can retire Dorian permanently, the happier I’ll be,” Q countered.</p><p> </p><p>Bond stopped, so Q stopped too, in a shadowed corner distant from the island of light and laptops he’d made for himself on the far end of the Foundry.</p><p> </p><p>Bond didn’t treat him like a child and say, “We’ll find another way.”</p><p><br/>
He didn’t apologize for Q having to do something unpleasant that churned up such unsettling memories from his past.</p><p> </p><p>He didn’t take him in his arms like he was fragile or kiss him like was easy to distract—though the last, Q admitted, if only to himself, might have worked.</p><p> </p><p>He said, “Alright, but three more laps first,” and resumed walking.</p><p> </p><p>After the requisite laps, Q returned to the couch, picked up the Dorian laptop, and entered the chat room he’d been trolling earlier, hoping to see a familiar name.</p><p> </p><p>“They’re here,” Q said, and Bond said, “Steady on,” as if Q needed the reminder, which his shaking hands probably suggested.</p><p> </p><p>He took a few deep breaths and closed his eyes, focusing on who he was now rather than who he’d been when Dorian and Codex had first ‘met.’<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>When he opened his eyes and brought his hands to the keyboard, they were steady as rails.</p><p> </p><p>“Good man,” Bond said, somehow bypassing patronizing and striking Q square in the heart with the praise.</p><p> </p><p>Predictably, Codex asked a few leading questions, trying to lure Dorian into betraying himself as an impostor.  When Q easily passed those tests, Codex moved into accusing him of being a spy, working from behind bars to reduce his sentence.</p><p> </p><p>None of this, of course, was expressed in any language Bond would have understood, everything coded despite the layers of security that the dark web and anonymity provided.</p><p> </p><p>When at last Codex seemed satisfied that Dorian had simply grown bored with the life of a multimillionaire and wanted to get back to causing trouble, Codex suggested they meet somewhere even less public than the private room they were already in.</p><p> </p><p>“Could be a trap,” he murmured.</p><p> </p><p>“Is that likely?”  Bond asked.</p><p> </p><p>Q shrugged.  “Depends on what he wants with Dorian.”</p><p> </p><p>“Any way to find out without going deeper?”</p><p> </p><p>“No,” Q said, sighing.  “Not really.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond didn’t respond.  He didn’t have to.  Q knew what needed doing.</p><p> </p><p>He entered the details Codex had offered and came to a blank screen, old-school green cursor blinking against a pixelated gold background.</p><p> </p><p>“Throwback Thursday,” Q noted, fingers hesitating over the first keystrokes.  Anything might be triggered by his entering a line of text.</p><p> </p><p>Then, before he could decide how to begin, Codex wrote: <em>Here?</em></p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>Here.</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>Where’ve you been really?  You can tell me.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>Here and there.</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Coy doesn’t become you, KC.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Q sucked in a sudden breath.</p><p> </p><p>“Q?” Bond asked, but Q couldn’t spare him a look or an answer.</p><p><br/>
His eyes were fixed on the blinking green cursor at the end of those two damning initials.</p><p> </p><p>“I know who Codex is,” Q whispered, hands shaking again.  He swallowed hard, mouth dry, and raised his suddenly damp hands to type a single word:</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Mish</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Took you long enough.  But then, you always take too long.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>I don’t understand.</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>You left me to die.  I didn’t.  But you and your daddy there will.  </em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>What’s the matter?  Cat got your tongue? Meow, kitty-cat.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>Mish?</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>“They’re gone,” Q croaked, exercising extreme self-control in closing the laptop, so he wouldn’t be tempted to throw it through the TV.</p><p> </p><p>Hands flat together and jammed between his clenched knees, Q tried to take deep breaths but discovered he couldn’t.  He moved his arms to the sides, so he could put his head on his knees, and tried again, telling himself to man up and get his act together in an internal voice that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to his mother’s third boyfriend, a prick named Art who spent his dole checks down at the local and let Q’s mum take a second job to pay the rent.</p><p> </p><p>Art had loved to lecture Q on responsibility in between slapping him in the back of the head and pinching his bottom on the rare occasions when Q made the mistake of being caught out of bed to use the loo after his mum was asleep.</p><p> </p><p>Q had been nine when Art had had a mysterious accident while taking out the garbage, made extra baffling by the fact that he’d never before undertaken any household chores and also it wasn’t rubbish day in Q’s neighborhood.</p><p> </p><p>Still, when Q was paralyzed by panic, trapped inside his own head, Art always visited him—until now, he’d been Q’s most vicious ghost.</p><p>“Mish is alive,” Q managed at last, sitting up and taking a long, wheezing breath, his lungs still feeling like they’d been wrapped in steel bands.</p><p> </p><p>Bond moved down the couch to sit beside him.  He didn’t touch Q, but his weight pressed down the edge of the cushion on which Q was so carefully perched, trying to keep himself from flying into a million pieces and dissipating in the suddenly freezing air of the Foundry.</p><p> </p><p>“How can you be sure it’s them?” Bond asked, his tone careful, professional—the calm voice of reason asking delicate questions while embers of the burning world sifted down into the victim’s hair.</p><p> </p><p>“They—” Q started, cleared his throat, tried again.  “They called me KC.  Kitty-cat,” he explained.  “It was a pet name…they never used it in front of anyone else, not even Rae or Alain.  It was…private.”</p><p> </p><p>“Rendition pries out even the most intimate of secrets,” Bond observed, still in that neutral investigator’s voice.</p><p> </p><p>“No,” Q said, shaking his head.  “It’s Mish.  I’m sure of it.”</p><p> </p><p>“Q—” Bond began.</p><p> </p><p>“Bond,” Q returned, looking into Bond’s eyes for the first time since he’d realized who he was chatting with in that private, dark-web room.  “It’s Mish.  They’re alive, and they’re coming for us.  They know about you, and they want us dead.  They think I a-abandoned…”</p><p> </p><p>To his eternal shame, Q heard his voice quaver into a higher register and felt a trail of heat down one cheek.  He hadn’t known he could still cry over this, never mind that he would do it now, in front of Bond, when Bond and the home office needed him most to keep his shit together.</p><p> </p><p>“I’m sorry,” he whispered, wiping the humiliating evidence from his cheek.</p><p> </p><p>“You keep saying that,” Bond demurred, putting an arm around Q and pulling him half onto his lap, so he could wrap his other arm around him too.</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve nothing to be sorry for, love,” Bond said, pressing a kiss to his temple and then tucking Q’s head beneath his chin as though Q were a child who’d been sent home sick from school.</p><p> </p><p>“I think you’d better tell me, though,” Bond added after Q had relaxed infinitesimally in Bond’s firm embrace.</p><p> </p><p>Q said, “Yes, of course,” and slipped off Bond’s lap to resume his own seat.  Bond didn’t take his arm from around his shoulders, though, a minor grace that Q thought he might never be able to repay.</p><p> </p><p>In halting words, with pauses to sift through memories he’d driven into the darkest corner of his mind, Q talked about the last few chaotic days of Mish’s life.</p><p> </p><p>“After M made me the offer I didn’t dare refuse, I was taken out of rendition, allowed to bathe and eat and sleep with the lights off and without music blaring.  I was moved to guest quarters, given a training schedule, and told when and where to go.  I was to speak only when spoken to or when I had a question related to the lesson I was supposed to be mastering.</p><p> </p><p>No one was cruel, precisely, but…”</p><p> </p><p>“They were cold.  Efficient,” Bond suggested.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
“Yes,” Q agreed.  “Finally, after four days of this, I went on a hunger strike—stopped eating, bathing, leaving my bed.  I told the guards that they could beat me, torture me, kill me for all I cared.  I wasn’t doing another fucking thing unless they let me speak with M.”</p><p> </p><p>“She showed up,” Bond predicted.</p><p> </p><p>“Mmm.  In the middle of the night, I was yanked from my bed, dowsed with a bucket of cold water, and told that I stank, and if I didn’t know better how to care for myself than the animals at the zoo, I’d be dropped into prison where I belonged.”</p><p> </p><p>“I told her she could fuck herself if she thought I was going to be her slave without proof that she’d taken care of Mish, like she’d promised.  I’m afraid I said rather a lot of things that make me ashamed even remembering them,” he added more quietly, recalling M’s frozen smile, the snake-like glitter of her hard eyes, and the way she kept her hands precisely flat at her sides.</p><p> </p><p>“She’s heard worse,” Bond observed, something in his tone indicating from who it was, exactly, M had heard scathing, vicious words.</p><p> </p><p>“That’s when she told me that all my protest was for nothing.  It took me far too long to figure out what she meant, but when I realized, I threw myself at her like a mad dog.  I think I’d have gladly snapped her neck if the guards hadn’t intervened, yet she stood there, unmoving, as if I hadn’t just lunged at her throat.”</p><p> </p><p>Q shook his head, remembering her expression, how he thought he’d seen something shift in her eyes, some modicum of sympathy, an iota of understanding.</p><p> </p><p>If he hadn’t seen what might not have been there—to this day, he wasn’t certain—Q would have ended his life that night.</p><p> </p><p>Instead, when M said, “Grow up.  You have a choice.  Stay here and make Mish’s sacrifice worth it, or go to prison where you belong,” Q had said, “I’ll stay.”</p><p> </p><p>“I think at first I had a vague idea that I was going to become some kind of super-hacker and use my skills to avenge Mish’s death.  But as the days and then weeks wore on, I became interested in the work that we do, the people we protect—the lives we sometimes save.  I was too cynical to believe, even then, that I was a white hat—that any of us were or are. </p><p> </p><p>But I didn’t need to be a white hat.  I just needed to…”</p><p> </p><p>“Have purpose,” Bond supplied.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes.”  Q answered on a blown-out breath.</p><p> </p><p>“So, what happened to Mish?” Bond asked a few moments later, as the warmth of their shared understanding faded once more into the cold, hard reality they faced.</p><p> </p><p>“M didn’t tell me that night.  In fact, I didn’t see her again for more than a year.  The day I ‘graduated’ from training, I was ordered to her office, where she explained what her personal expectations for me were—without, naturally, ever identifying the places at which personal and professional diverged, though there were several points, to be sure—and then slid a plain brown ‘Eyes Only’ file over her desk to me.</p><p> </p><p>‘Memorize it,’ she said.  ‘You have ten minutes.’”</p><p> </p><p>Q took in a long breath, recalling how those ten minutes had felt like a lifetime.</p><p> </p><p>“According to the prison warden’s report and the incident reports filed by the two guards who witnessed the incident, Mish was cornered in the yard during the mandatory exercise block and bludgeoned to death with a brick.  Where the inmates had gotten the brick wasn’t explained in the report.  Mish’s face was so badly damaged that they had to use fingerprints to identify them—dental records would have been pointless.”</p><p> </p><p>He found himself speaking in almost clinical precision, as if giving Bond vital intelligence he’d need for a successful mission and not as though he were recounting the horrific death of a person Q had desperately loved.</p><p> </p><p>Of course, as it turned out, Q’s grief had been wasted.  The electric arc of recognition chasing through his chest made him wince, and Bond put a hand lightly on his knee, asking without asking.</p><p> </p><p>Rather than lie and say he was fine, Q went on, in a rush to get to the end of the story.</p><p> </p><p>“Obviously, the death record was falsified.  Someone died in that prison yard, but it wasn’t Mish.  Naturally, M forbade me from approaching the warden or guards.”</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Naturally</em>, you ignored her,” Bond guessed.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes.  But they stuck to the story that was in the file.  I even traced the histories of the two inmates to see if they had any connection to Goliathan, but there was nothing there—no connection.  No sudden deposits to their commissary accounts, no unexpected windfalls for their family members.”</p><p> </p><p>Q paused, considering.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
“I guess now I know why there was no connection—they didn’t kill Mish or order them killed.  Mish is still alive out there somewhere, hunting me.”</p><p> </p><p>“But why now?” Bond asked.</p><p> </p><p>It was a good question, and one that Q knew he had to discover the answer to soon if they were going to be ready for what came next.</p><p> </p><p>He could try contacting Mish again via his Codex name, but Q had a feeling they’d ignore him now that the bait had been set in the trap.</p><p> </p><p>“Likely Mish will reach out to me,” Q said.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
“Mm, if only to let you know where to lay your neck,” Bond answered, mind obviously traveling a track identical to Q’s.</p><p> </p><p>“I need intel before that,” Q continued.</p><p> </p><p>Bond said, “Let me call in a favor,” and without any further explanation, he squeezed Q’s knee before rising and disappeared into the bedroom.</p><p> </p><p>The murmur of his voice followed shortly thereafter, but Q didn’t bother to strain to hear what he was saying.  He had his own channels of inquiry, starting with SweetEvil999.</p><p> </p><p>It was a matter of moments to locate her in an eco-terrorist forum and draw her into a private chat, where he hinted that there might be something going on with Codex01000010.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Rumor is he’s grassed</strong>, Q typed.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Rumor said the same thing about you.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>“Fair,” Q muttered.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>I had my reasons for going underground.</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>So?  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>So, have you heard anything?</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>What are you worried about?  They have something on you?</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>This deep everyone’s at risk.</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>Shit.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>Still there?</strong>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>/</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>Bond had returned to the living area when Q closed the laptop and let his head fall back against the top of the couch.  He stared at the distant rafters and tried to work out what 999 might do with the seeds he’d just planted.</p><p> </p><p>She’d always been more paranoid than most hackers, which was saying something, and she had a lot of people to protect: As a True Believer in her cause, she wouldn’t risk others getting picked up, Q thought.</p><p> </p><p>She’d start moving people out of certain circles soon, and that movement would alert Codex—Mish—that Q had made a move.</p><p> </p><p>In the meantime, Q had a thread to pull now.  Codex might be good at covering their tracks, but Mish had been living at Her Majesty’s pleasure for months, and somewhere there were records. </p><p> </p><p>Bond put a hand on his wrist as Q reached for the laptop.</p><p> </p><p>“I may have a lead.  I have a…friend…in the PPRS ministry.” </p><p> </p><p>“I’m sure she’s delightful,” Q observed.  It was catty, but his control was a fine mesh being battered by storm winds. </p><p> </p><p>“He is, actually,” Bond answered, going on as if Q hadn’t interrupted him, apparently happy to pretend that Q was fine.</p><p> </p><p>It helped to be reminded that he was pretending to be fine.  Despite the painful revelations of the past few days, Q found it almost a relief to have the wounds reopened and bleeding freely.  At the risk of abusing a tired metaphor, Q thought that maybe draining the wounds would make it easier to heal.</p><p>“This friend has access to some sensitive information, details of prison deaths, for example, that wouldn’t have been included in the official and public reports,” Bond explained.</p><p> </p><p>“Does this friend work for M?”  Really, he was musing aloud, but Bond’s smirk told him he’d struck gold with the question.</p><p> </p><p>“He’ll get back to me shortly with what he can dig up.”</p><p> </p><p>“Mish may discover the information has been accessed,” Q cautioned.</p><p> </p><p>Bond shook his head.  “This friend is quite adept at covering his tracks.  And anyway, spooking Mish might throw them off their game.”</p><p> </p><p>Q didn’t know.  He’d realized in the last few hours that everything he thought he’d known about Mish must be a lie.  If Mish was the original Codex01000010—<em>CodexM</em>, fuck, but he’d been a fool—then they’d been hacking for at least a year before Alain was killed.</p><p> </p><p>Q had known that Mish had been learning from Rae, but he’d had no idea how much of Rae’s lessons Mish had absorbed nor how far they’d gone with that knowledge.</p><p> </p><p>“I didn’t know them at all.”  Only as the words hit the air did Q realize he’d spoken them aloud.</p><p> </p><p>“At the risk of indulging in cliché,” Bond said, “Do we really ever know anyone?”</p><p> </p><p>Q rotated his head against the cushion to take in Bond’s expression.  Bond was looking back at him, his eyes warm and sad, mouth quirked up in a self-deprecating little smile.</p><p> </p><p>“Secrets are made to be taken to the grave,” Q said by way of agreeing with Bond, and Bond’s smile turned down at the corners.</p><p> </p><p>He felt immediately colder for having inspired that change.</p><p> </p><p>“I wonder if M felt that way at the very end,” were not the words Q had expected.  He searched Bond’s face—there was no deflective humor, no careful neutrality.</p><p> </p><p>There was pain, carefully shored up against, and weariness and a visceral weight of age and experience.</p><p> </p><p>Q couldn’t have stopped himself from reaching out and tracing the wrinkles at the corners of Bond’s mouth and eyes if his life had depended on it.  He felt like they were a kind of cipher intended to be read like Braille—if only he could translate the lines into words…</p><p> </p><p>Bond captured his hand and kissed his fingertips, one by one, before lacing his fingers though Q’s and resting their joined hands on the couch between them.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t want to keep secrets from you,” Bond said, surprising Q again.  With a gesture and a wry smile, he added, “Beyond what you’ve already gleaned from M’s eyes-only personnel files, that is.”</p><p> </p><p>Q didn’t bother to deny that he’d dug around in Bond’s records long before he’d had any reasonable excuse for doing so.</p><p> </p><p>Stomach flipping nervously, Q sat up straighter and pulled his knee up, so he was facing Bond more directly.  Bond didn’t let go of his hand, and Q found that he couldn’t swallow around the cold, tight ball caught in his throat.  What was he going to hear that he didn’t already know? </p><p> </p><p>Was there a Mish in Bond’s past, a beloved someone whom he’d betrayed and then lost?  The tragic story of sad, misguided Vesper hardly competed with the operatic angst of Q’s own destroyed love.</p><p> </p><p>Bond caught and held Q’s eyes, took a visible breath, and said, “I love you.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Take Me Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Unprepared for the words, shocked by how painful it was to force air through his panic-constricted windpipe, Q felt his eyes go wide, and it was a matter of using every ounce of his remaining control to keep from clutching his throat like a distressed damsel from a silent film.</p><p> </p><p>He closed his eyes, breaking the arc of the current passing between them, and felt Bond withdraw his hand.</p><p> </p><p>Q wanted to protest that it wasn’t what Bond thought, that he wasn’t panicking over Bond’s declaration because he—Q—<em>didn’t</em> share his feelings but because he <em>did</em>.</p><p> </p><p><em>God, but I do love you</em>, Q thought, but even were he once again braceleted to a chair in some grim, secret sub-basement, Q couldn’t have forced the words out.</p><p> </p><p>When he opened his eyes, Bond was still looking at him but wearing now that guarded, neutral look he got when M was giving him orders he didn’t want to hear but also couldn’t avoid.</p><p> </p><p>“Bond,” Q started, his voice rough.  He cleared his throat and tried again, “James, I—”</p><p> </p><p>Bond held up a hand, the one that moments ago had been holding Q’s own.  “You don’t have to say anything.  This is about my secrets, not yours.  You keep yours.  Give them to me only when you’re ready.”</p><p> </p><p>Q’s heart was pounding so hard in the hollow of his throat that he thought his voice should quaver when he said, “What if I never am?”  He hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t wanted to throw that much weight onto Bond, who so far had done most of the lifting in this relationship of theirs.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s shrug was an elegant thing.  “Then you aren’t.”</p><p> </p><p>Q shook his head.  “But that wouldn’t be fair to you.”<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>“Life is seldom fair,” was Bond’s pat answer, his tone keeping it to just the polite side of glib.  He’d retreated into clichés, and it was Q’s fault.  Q had reduced a legendary raconteur to greeting card bromides.</p><p> </p><p>For the life of him, Q didn’t know how to apologize.</p><p> </p><p>He was saved by the incoming text chime on Bond’s burner.  Q considered the kind of trust it would require for Bond to give someone that number and then dismissed the sudden stab of jealousy that followed the thought. </p><p> </p><p>He didn’t have any right to it.</p><p> </p><p>“My friend says that both prisoners involved in Mish’s ‘death’ also died within a month of the killing—both of overdoses.  That’s less surprising than the fact that one of the two guards also died—car accident—and the warden retired a month later and moved to Majorca with his wife.”</p><p> </p><p>“The remaining guard?” Q asked around a mouthful of desert sand.</p><p> </p><p>“No record of him.  He stopped coming to work, disappeared off the grid.”</p><p> </p><p>Q swallowed again, trying to work up moisture in his mouth to speak.  “Someone has a great deal of reach.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond nodded.  “I think it’s safe to say we’re seeing the shadow of the man or organization behind Mish’s ‘resurrection.’”</p><p> </p><p>Q swallowed again and looked down at his hands, which were clutching his knees in white-knuckled death-grips, as if he was holding himself together by a total force of will.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s been a long day,” Bond said after a moment, still a true observation for all that it was also banal.  “Why don’t we get some rest, approach things fresh in the morning.”</p><p> </p><p>“Mish knows about the Foundry.  It’s likely they know we’re here.  I don’t think it’s safe to stay here.”</p><p> </p><p>“Are they good enough to override your security measures?” Bond asked, eyebrow going up in surprise.</p><p> </p><p>It was Q’s turn to shrug.  “Maybe?  It’s been a decade; I don’t know what they’re capable of anymore.  We’re better safe than sorry.”</p><p> </p><p>“There’s no place we can go locally that’s safer than right here, and it’s late.  Neither of us is at our best.  I think it’s better to stay here for tonight and figure out our plan of attack in the morning.”</p><p> </p><p>Intellectually, Q appreciated Bond’s reasonable advice.  Emotionally, he felt like an exposed wire whipping in a gale wind—at any moment he might be struck into lightning, frying anyone too close right along with him.</p><p> </p><p>Q might have pushed harder to leave—instinct was screaming to run, run, run—except that as he opened his mouth to speak, his face was split by a jaw-cracking yawn, and Bond’s knowing smirk did the rest of the convincing.</p><p> </p><p>“To bed,” Bond said, gesturing toward the room they shared.</p><p> </p><p>Q was ridiculously relieved to discover, moments later, that Bond wasn’t moving his things to another room.  They went about their evening ablutions, slipped into their sleep clothes and beneath the sheet and comforter, Q wondering how long it would take him to fall asleep with the still weight of Bond in the bed beside him, so close but essentially untouchable because of Q’s inability to commit.</p><p> </p><p>Then Bond rumbled, “Go to sleep,” and rolled onto his side to press a kiss to the corner of Q’s mouth.  Q turned his head to give Bond a proper kiss and let himself be drawn into Bond’s arms, where he must have fallen asleep, for he remembered nothing else until the insistent bleat of a perimeter alarm brought him back to the world.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was standing beside the bed in his briefs, gun already in his hand, when Q opened his eyes and reached for his glasses before peering at the time on his phone.</p><p> </p><p>It was a little after three in the morning and the room was black as pitch, which shouldn’t be—there were low-level strip lights along the molding in the hallways, installed to keep Q from running into a wall on his quest for the loo.</p><p> </p><p>Those were out.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
But if the power were out everywhere, then the perimeter alarm wouldn’t still be—</p><p> </p><p>Silence.</p><p> </p><p>Bond said, “Earpiece. Moving,” and then disappeared.  Q popped his earwig in, grateful for the paranoia that had insisted on a second set for the bedroom.  Then he pulled his own gun from the night-table and followed Bond into the hall, turning not toward but away from the living area, his mission the electrics room, where he’d had the management company install a switch for the back-up generator. Mish couldn’t have known about the setup unless they were a far better hacker than Q gave them credit for.</p><p> </p><p>If they were, Q was about to find out.</p><p> </p><p>His entry was textbook—open door from opposite side, go in low, roll away from projected initial trajectory, lead with gun sight.</p><p> </p><p>Nothing.  Closing the door silently behind him, Q made his way mostly by feel to the locker on the far wall, keying in the code by feel.  It opened on his first try, and the glowing lights of the back-up server told him the generator was functioning properly. </p><p> </p><p>“Lights are coming on,” Q warned.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
“Affirmative,” Bond answered.</p><p> </p><p>“3-2-1,” Q counted before closing his eyes and throwing the switch.  The back-up system hummed to life, and a wash of orange against the inside of his eyelids told Q the emergency LEDs had gone on.</p><p> </p><p>Q closed and locked the server closet and crossed the room at a jog, pressing himself against the wall opposite the door opening before yanking it open and reversing the course he’d taken on the way in.</p><p> </p><p>No gunfire greeted his gymnastic display.  He moved toward the living area quickly and quietly and flattened himself against the wall a meter before the hallway ended.  Any closer, and someone standing in the kitchen might see him.</p><p> </p><p>“Clear,” Bond said, his voice loud because he was close.  He appeared at the end of the hallway just as Q was engaging the safety on his gun, and Q strode to meet him.</p><p> </p><p>“No sign of entry,” Bond reported.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Q nodded.  “Mish wasn’t here.  They were fucking with the system to prove they could, that’s all.”</p><p> </p><p>“Guess we’re fortunate they didn’t choose to engage the sprinklers, then,” Bond noted.</p><p> </p><p>“Quite.”</p><p> </p><p>“Coffee.”</p><p> </p><p>“Why not?  We’re up for good now.”</p><p> </p><p>Over coffee and toast with jam, they discussed their next move.</p><p> </p><p>“We could stay here and draw Mish to us,” Q suggested.  He didn’t like how insecure the Foundry suddenly felt, but he also hated the idea of being driven out by Mish’s little stunt.</p><p> </p><p>“Bait in our own trap?” Bond said.  “It has possibilities.  But…”</p><p> </p><p>“But it’s dangerous, and we don’t know what Mish knows about the place.”</p><p> </p><p>“Mm.  I think this,” Bond gestured at the air with his toast point, “was meant to lead us to believe they know more than they do.  It’s one thing hacking a security system—”<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Q made a noise, and Bond smirked, “Even yours,” he added.  “It’s another to make a frontal assault.”</p><p> </p><p>“Mish always liked a big show,” Q suggested.  “They wouldn’t want to take us by surprise; they’d want us ready and waiting for their dramatic entrance.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s possible Mish has changed a lot in the last decade,” Bond said gently in what was possibly the greatest understatement of said decade.</p><p> </p><p>“Possible, but not likely, not given what they just pulled with the alarm and lights.  Anyway, I can prevent that from happening again, and Mish isn’t likely to try it twice either.”</p><p> </p><p>“So, we’re standing our ground?” Bond asked, and there was something tentative in the question.  Q got the sense that it was not so much the idea of being bait that bothered Bond; the uncertainty came in whose ground it was they were fighting for.</p><p> </p><p>“Mish tried to kill us,” Q said succinctly.  “Me, I can understand.  You are off-limits.  They aren’t getting a second shot at you.  I’m not choosing to stay here out of some hope of a happy reunion, Bond.  I’m choosing to stay here because the advantage goes to the home team, no matter what Mish tried to make us believe with their little lights and sirens show.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond let the declaration hang there while he scanned Q’s face.  He must have decided he liked what he saw there, because he leaned over the breakfast counter to kiss him.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Bond tasted of strawberries and strong coffee, and Q chased the flavor along his lips and into his mouth.</p><p> </p><p>When he pulled away, Q couldn’t help but lick his lips to get the last of Bond’s flavor.</p><p> </p><p>“Stop that,” Bond chided, his voice lower than usual and gratifyingly rough.  “We have work to do.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yes, well,” Q said, “It’s your fault for being so…”  He waved to indicate all that Bond is, was, and ever would be.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s smirk was a sly glory.</p><p> </p><p>“Shut up,” Q enunciated, taking their dishes to the sink.</p><p> </p><p>He spent the rest of the morning and half of the afternoon tracking down how Mish had gotten access to the lights and alarms, sent a terse note to the Foundry’s management firm about remembering to install updates, and then upgraded their software well past its factory standard.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was gone for most of that time, though the occasional footfall on the roof gave Q an indication of what he was doing.  When he finally came back in, a brisk breeze nipping at his heels, his cheeks were flushed and his eyes bright, and it took a lot for Q to go back to the work he’d been doing trying to make connections between Mish and Codex.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>While he worked, Bond prowled the perimeter and then disappeared into one of the spare bedrooms, emerging at last to say, “You need to eat something,” as he passed him.</p><p> </p><p>Q didn’t look up again until Bond reappeared, damp from the shower and distractingly barefoot, hand warm on his shoulder, lips hot against his neck where it was exposed above the collar of the shirt he was wearing.</p><p> </p><p>Q shivered pleasantly and said, “Alright,” without much protest, trailing Bond to the kitchen to watch him throw together a simple meal.</p><p> </p><p>They ate companionably, the talk desultory, until they’d had their fill.  Then they pushed their plates away.</p><p> </p><p>“I think I’ve fixed the issues with our systems,” Q said, nodding at the security panel by the door.</p><p> </p><p>“I’ve done some upgrades as well,” Bond said, filling him in on the more direct approach he’d taken to Foundry defense.</p><p> </p><p>Suffice it to say that Q would avoid the roof of their building, the two buildings on either side of the Foundry, the alley behind the Foundry, and several spots along the route between the door and street, as well.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>“And I’ve acquired us a car,” Bond added, holding up matching keyless fobs before handing one to Q.</p><p> </p><p>“Impressive,” it was Q’s turn to say.</p><p> </p><p>Bond shrugged as if it were nothing, and Q supposed that for a man with his training and experience, it really wasn’t.  There was a certain glow to his eyes and bounce in his step that suggested he was thoroughly in his element, and it occurred to Q that Bond may have felt criminally underutilized to this point.</p><p> </p><p>“Thank you,” he said, trying to put some of those thoughts into his voice.</p><p> </p><p>Bond smiled.  “It was my pleasure,” and he obviously meant it.</p><p> </p><p>After a few more minutes of Bond walking him through the not-quite-literal minefield in the alley and the location of the stashed getaway car, they settled into silence, not the tense, waiting-for-a-shoe-to-drop sort but the sort that Q imagined established couples frequently experienced.</p><p> </p><p>Naturally, that made him nervous, and he cursed his treacherous stomach, flipping queasily, and his ridiculous anxiety, which suggested that now was the perfect time to bring up the ugliest and most awful parts of his history, if only to disturb the peace, which couldn’t last anyway.</p><p> </p><p>Q knew what sabotage looked like, given who and what he was, so he certainly recognized when he was doing it to himself.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>He resisted the impulse to say something he’d regret, but he couldn’t quite stop his hand from smoothing over an invisible crease in his trousers, a nervous motion only foregone when Bond laid a warm hand over his cold one.</p><p> </p><p>Bond turned Q’s hand beneath his own and laced their fingers together and said, “Tell me,” in the voice Q had heard on many occasions over the comms link, the commander-of-men tone he reserved for marshaling order out of utter chaos (never mind that Bond was usually the one responsible for the chaos to begin with).</p><p> </p><p>Q swallowed and willed his stomach to settle.  He tried to order his thoughts, but they were scattered, fleeting things, tearing off into dark corners and hiding from his efforts to hold them still until he could give them voice.</p><p> </p><p>He shook his head and said, at last, “I don’t know what to say.”</p><p> </p><p>“Something’s bothering you,” Bond observed in that easy, safe tone he used to cajole intel out of terrified witnesses.  Under other circumstances, Q would have been offended to hear that tone used on himself.</p><p> </p><p>In this case, though…</p><p> </p><p>“I’m just…”  Another shake of the head.  “I’ve dragged you into this mess, and I can only imagine what you think of me now, and I know that you’re being your professional self because it’s beyond you to be anything else, but—”</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s hand tightening in his own stopped the cascade of words.</p><p> </p><p>When he focused on Bond’s face—he’d been staring at a spot just over his shoulder, seeing nothing—he saw there a frank hurt that made him flinch.  In that second of recognition, Bond smoothed his features into the bland savoir faire more typical of 007, and Q almost flinched again.</p><p> </p><p>“You think I’m doing all this for you because you’re my <em>quartermaster</em>?” Bond asked, his voice carefully inflectionless, as if there weren’t a great deal at personal stake in Q’s answer.</p><p> </p><p>Q shook his head, swallowed again, wondering vaguely, distractedly, if he’d ever be able to eat again without this wretched nausea.</p><p> </p><p>“N-no,” Q stuttered.  He took a deep breath, closed his eyes against the cool look in Bond’s eyes, and gave himself a mental slap. </p><p> </p><p>“No, I don’t.  I mean, not only because I’m your quartermaster but also because I’m your—”</p><p> </p><p>Bond waited, and if there was something like a distant light of hope kindling back in the cool recesses of Bond’s eyes, Q tried not to notice it, fearing what it meant if he gave it reason to grow into flames.  They might both burn in the conflagration.  They might both be destroyed…</p><p>…as he and Mish had, all those years ago, and Jesus, was he really so blind, such a pathetic fool?  Could he have been this willfully ignorant of his own profound dysfunction?</p><p> </p><p>Was it possible to have become one of the most powerful people in Her Majesty’s intelligence community while being so deeply stupid regarding the one subject of which he should have the greatest command, namely himself?</p><p> </p><p>In short, yes.</p><p> </p><p>“God, I’ve been a fool…” He groaned, letting his eyes catch on Bond’s, clinging to his gaze, willing him to see what he was struggling so mightily to put into words.</p><p> </p><p>“I love you,” he said clearly, without a quiver in his voice or any hesitation.  “I love you, and you love me, and we deserve to try to be happy together without all this bloody mess of my past fucking things up.”</p><p> </p><p>Apparently, it was the right thing to say, a conclusion he only came to later—much later—after the surprised, pleased sound Bond made and his mouth impressing that pleasure upon Q’s and then the swift removal of clothes and the thorough mapping of his body with Bond’s lips and fingers, the arching up, the crying out, the blinding orgasm and Bond’s deep, satisfied groan as he used Q’s spend to jack himself off and spill across Q’s chest and belly.</p><p> </p><p>Q was half on and half off the couch, Bond managing to look elegant even in his fucked out, boneless sprawl beside him, when an alert pinged on the Dorian laptop.</p><p> </p><p>Despite the urgency of their overall situation, Q allowed himself a few more moments of post-coital bliss:  The heat and solidity of Bond’s body beside his, the smell of their mingled spend, the looseness in his muscles and the happiness like warmth pooling in his belly.</p><p> </p><p>Then Bond was rising, moving naked across the floor, confident and graceful, returning with a warm, wet cloth to share, and Q wanted to forget Dorian and Mish and the whole fucking mess and take Bond to bed and spend a year figuring out what else pulled that sound out of him besides what they’d just been up to.</p><p> </p><p>Sadly, the world didn’t care what Q wanted, and he himself was too aware of the pressure of time and the shifting balance of circumstances to indulge in anymore fantasizing.</p><p> </p><p>It was enough to have Bond beside him, watching his fingers fly over the keys, scanning the same intel and working toward a solution together.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Homecoming</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“It’s as I thought,” Q confirmed a few minutes later, eyes scanning code scrolling down his screen.  “There was a spike in the power grid while we were…”  He let a smile substitute for the verb, and Bond hummed in that way he had, and Q went on.  “Mish must have been testing our new defenses.”</p><p> </p><p>“Let them,” Bond said, not a challenge but a statement.  “They’ll find we aren’t so easy to surprise a second time.”</p><p> </p><p>Q was trolling the usual chatrooms for a bite when he noticed something peculiar.</p><p> </p><p>“That’s odd,” he said, diving back into the site archive to find the earlier thread, which only confirmed what he suspected.</p><p> </p><p>“What is it?” Bond asked.</p><p> </p><p>“This shows that SweetEvil999 has been on and active up until a few minutes ago.  But she bailed yesterday, after I gave her the warning about Mish being a spook.”</p><p> </p><p>“You think it’s Mish?”  It wasn’t really a question.</p><p> </p><p>“I can’t see it being 999.  She’s even more paranoid than she is clever.  She wouldn’t hang about here if she suspected Codex was a grass.”</p><p> </p><p>“Could Mish have spoofed her username?”</p><p> </p><p>Q arched an eyebrow in Bond’s direction, and Bond huffed in mock-offense. </p><p> </p><p>“I’m not a complete Luddite, you know.”</p><p> </p><p>Q did know.  He had better reason than most to know just how talented Bond was with computers; he’d walked him through enough at-the-source data theft, after all.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes, I believe Mish is capable of spoofing 999’s identity.  The alternative explanation is too dark to entertain.” </p><p> </p><p>Mish could have gained access to 999’s handle by using her laptop, but that would suggest that 999 was incapacitated or dead, and Q couldn’t think about that right now.</p><p> </p><p>“They’re bold, though, if they think this lot won’t notice.”  Q nodded at the screen, indicating the motley assortment of black hats, trust fund sociopaths, anti-government loons, hacktivists, and the like who called this corner of the dark web their home.</p><p> </p><p>“I think Mish cares about only <em>one</em> of you lot noticing,” Bond said, meaning heavy in his tone.</p><p> </p><p>Q nodded absently, focused on the screen as he took apart the spoof account to find its origin.  As he’d expected, it was coming from a VPN, and it would take more computer power and time than he had to trace it.</p><p> </p><p>Anyway, he was fairly certain he knew exactly where Mish was, at least within a couple of postal codes.</p><p> </p><p>“I can make them care,” Q suggested darkly, and he saw Bond nod, a tight, unhappy motion, on his periphery.</p><p> </p><p>It didn’t take much to bait the trap; he pretended he hadn’t caught on to the spoofed username and spilled to “999” like she was his high school confidante.  The things he suggested about Codex were not complimentary.</p><p> </p><p>“Admirable control,” Bond noted as Mish/999 spooled out more and more rope by which Dorian might hang himself, asking leading questions and inserting appropriate expressions of concern or sympathy where required.</p><p> </p><p>“They always were good at play-acting,” Q noted, ignoring with supreme deliberateness the roiling chill of unease in his gut at the reminder of how Mish used to sometimes behave.</p><p> </p><p>He guessed the signs were always there that Mish wasn’t exactly stable.  They used to sometimes seek attention by playing one friend off against another, usually joining with Alain and Rae to gang up on Q when he’d been too busy or too distracted to pay what Mish considered enough attention to them.</p><p> </p><p>They’d be laughing riotously, with total, wet-eyed abandon at something one moment, and a few minutes later, they’d be prostrate across their shared bed, in tears over some perceived slight.</p><p> </p><p>At the time, Q had been so desperate for the stability his friends provided him, so desperately in need of Mish’s love and affection, he’d done everything he could to avoid upsetting Mish.</p><p> </p><p>Mish’s mood had become the barometer around which Q had planned his days, every low-pressure system unsettling him, every storm inviting the fear that Mish would leave him and take Rae and Alain with them.</p><p> </p><p>And he’d carried that uncertainty with him into the rest of his life, Q realized then with an almost electric zing of recognition.</p><p> </p><p>After Mish, Q hadn’t had a relationship that lasted more than a few months.  Q had assumed it was because of his dysfunctional upbringing and the crushing guilt of what had happened to Mish, his One True Love.</p><p> </p><p>Then, too, he’d justified his solitude with work—he was too busy, his position too important for him to waste time on intimacy.</p><p> </p><p>But Q had been hiding from something else, a deeper truth than just the fact that his relationship with Mish had ended so tragically.</p><p> </p><p>He’d ignored the fact that that relationship hadn’t been perfect, hadn’t been the anti-establishment, free-love idyll he’d thought it was when he was 20 and in love for the first time.</p><p> </p><p>Now, older and wiser and, perhaps most importantly, sitting next to a man who’d proved that love could be patient and passionate and flexible, that love shouldn’t hinge on hurtful words or mood swings but could survive those momentary storms and thrive on forgiveness and equal love…</p><p> </p><p>Q couldn’t believe he’d been so blind for so long.</p><p> </p><p>Of course, to be fair to himself, he’d avoided facing these ghosts for most of the last decade.</p><p> </p><p>And again, he could credit James Bond with helping him arrive at this new understanding, for if Bond had rejected him, had been disgusted by his confession, or if he’d decided that Q was too much work, came to him too damaged and difficult—well, Q was not sure where he’d have ended up ultimately, but he knew it wouldn’t be sitting there working side by side with a man who genuinely loved him for who he was, scars and all.</p><p> </p><p>“When this is over,” Q said, not looking at Bond but still typing away.  “I’m going to take you to bed and spend at least a week showing you exactly how much I love you.”</p><p> </p><p>Q caught the slow, wicked smile that spread across Bond’s face before he said, “Let’s get this done, then.”</p><p> </p><p>It was rather anticlimactic when Q had finished stringing “999” along, talking about what an asshole Codex was for grassing and how no one would ever be able to trust him again, how “999” should disappear for a while, just until Dorian could “take care of” the problem.</p><p> </p><p>Dorian urged “999” to be safe and signed off, telling her where in the virtual world she could find him if she needed him.</p><p> </p><p>That clue offered Mish-cum-“999” the perfect little back door into Dorian/Q’s system, which was, of course, precisely what Q intended.</p><p> </p><p>When the lights went out again a few minutes later, it wasn’t Mish’s doing, though the system was reading a breach.  Q had triggered the failure when Mish had taken the bait.</p><p> </p><p>He’d also prevented the emergency lights from powering on; the back-up generator was supporting only the most vital servers, nothing that Mish could easily detect or access.</p><p> </p><p>He and Bond moved in a darkness of their own making.</p><p> </p><p>At Q’s urging, Bond had also disabled all but a few of the nearest traps, wanting to herd Mish toward the door without any real harm coming to them.</p><p> </p><p>Q had plans for this reunion, and he didn’t want them spoiled by an errant explosion.</p><p> </p><p>Of course, he knew Mish wouldn’t come through the door; they might be arrogant, but they weren’t stupid.<br/>
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</p><p>That left the roof, where Bond had also rigged the traps in such a way that Mish would be sure to avoid them.</p><p> </p><p>There were only three places Mish could gain entry to the Foundry up there, and Q and Bond were ready for each possibility.</p><p> </p><p>“More exciting than baccarat?” Q had asked as Bond had returned from resetting the roof traps.</p><p> </p><p>“Infinitely,” Bond answered with a shark-like smile.</p><p> </p><p>Q was glad that cold intent wasn’t focused on him.  Mish didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.</p><p> </p><p>Q hadn’t had time to really consider what he’d be faced with once Mish breached the perimeter, but if he had given it some thought, the figure that landed in front of the television in a shower of reinforced sky-light glass wasn’t it.</p><p> </p><p>They made a show of nonchalantly detaching their rappelling harness and stepping out of it.<br/>
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</p><p>Mish had always been lithe and graceful, with a pixie-like animation to their features that could light up a room.</p><p> </p><p>They’d also been as dedicated to androgyny as it was possible for a person to be.  Many the rude stranger had speculated within their hearing whether Mish were a boy or a girl.</p><p> </p><p>Their answer—<em>collectively</em>—had always been, “Fuck off,” though Rae had usually come up with a string of more inventive suggestions for what the speaker could do with their blood relatives and their more intimate parts.</p><p> </p><p>The body-fitting catsuit and knit watch-cap made it difficult to see the person Q had known; this Mish was leaner, their muscles more defined, their face largely hidden by the balaclava.</p><p> </p><p>Q struggled to reconcile his memories of the person he'd known with the one standing before him now, and by Mish’s derisive grin, it was apparent that they’d achieved the effect they’d been aiming for.</p><p> </p><p>Bond, meanwhile, was leaning against the kitchen counter with his gun held easily in one hand, aimed at Mish’s center mass and looking for all the world like he’d been waiting for Mish to arrive, so they could have a nightcap together.</p><p> </p><p>Mish barely spared Bond a glance.  Given that they needed Mish alive to give up the mole inside MI-6, Mish’s dismissal of the double-O could be calculation, but it could also be conceit.</p><p> </p><p>They held that tableau for what felt like hours but was probably only a minute or two.</p><p> </p><p>Q refused to be the one to speak first.  He waited, swallowing surreptitiously to get his heart out of his throat, and kept as neutral an expression on his face as he could manage under the circumstances.</p><p> </p><p>“You haven’t changed a bit,” Mish breathed, pulling down the balaclava to reveal their face and taking three swaying steps toward Q.  In this, at least, Mish <em>hadn’t</em> changed:  They’d always been almost balletic in the way they’d walked.</p><p> </p><p>Q watched Mish’s eyes sweep over him, dragging up and down his body in a provocative manner, probably calculated to make Q uncomfortable.</p><p> </p><p>Q didn’t let his discomfort show on his face, and he fought to keep his shoulders loose, to maintain his ready stance, to not let Mish get to him.</p><p> </p><p>He caught the moment when Mish’s eyes stuttered to a halt on the Dorian laptop.</p><p> </p><p>“Well, aren’t you sentimental?  And here I thought you threw away all of your toys.”  There was an oily undercurrent in their tone, their implication hard to miss.</p><p> </p><p>Q shrugged, though it felt like he was lifting the weight of the world when he did.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Some</em> things are worth keeping,” he answered, baiting Mish.</p><p> </p><p>Bond straightened away from the counter but made no other move, yet even that minor motion betrayed his concern with Q taunting Mish like that.  After all, Mish was the unknown variable in this three-sided equation they were solving.</p><p> </p><p>“Not me, though,” Mish filled in.  There was a manic light in their eyes and a twist to their lips as they spoke, and they took three more, much quicker steps, which put them too close to Q for Bond to fire without risking the bullet hitting them both.</p><p> </p><p>Mish was close enough to touch, but Q, of course, didn’t reach out.  In fact, he couldn’t feel his hands; something in the dark glitter of Mish’s eyes had frozen him as if he were a rabbit trapped in a snake’s unfeeling gaze.</p><p> </p><p>It felt like between one breath and the next, anything might happen.</p><p> </p><p>Q, frantic to recover his equilibrium, focused on the details of Mish’s features.  This close, he could see a scar curled like a comma at one corner of Mish’s mouth and a shadowed spot on their left temple, where they’d apparently suffered some serious injury a long time ago.</p><p> </p><p>They hadn't shaved, and the stubble was coming in a rusty brown.  Q wondered if the hair hidden by the balaclava was the same color; when he’d known Mish, they had dyed it a purple-black, like the wings of a raven in the sunlight.  Their eyes were a dark chocolate brown, but looking at them now, Q couldn’t imagine ever having found them warm.</p><p> </p><p>Now, they seemed only avid, alight with some diseased appetite.</p><p> </p><p>Mish stroked a finger down their own cheek, glove audibly dragging through the stubble.</p><p> </p><p>“Do you like it?” they asked, making a teasing, flirty moue.  “I thought you’d prefer the butch look for this reunion.”</p><p> </p><p>“This isn’t a social call,” Q reminded them.  “You’re a murderer-by-proxy, not to mention a traitor to your nation.”</p><p> </p><p>Mish’s sharp bark of laughter scythed through Q with an almost electric shock.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re one to talk about hypocrisy, Q,” they said, putting meaningful weight on the initial.  “Or have you forgotten when you were my KC and not some government cunt?”</p><p> </p><p>Q’s immediate, wholly irrelevant response was to think how Rae had hated that word, how she would have punched Mish in the mouth if they’d used it in front of her.</p><p> </p><p>His next thought was far more useful:  This person before him bore no resemblance to the Mish he’d known and loved.  With every word, they made of themself a stranger to Q.</p><p> </p><p>That made Q’s next decision clear.</p><p> </p><p>“Give yourself up.  You’re outnumbered and outgunned.  No matter how crazy you are, I know you’re still smart enough to recognize when the odds are against you.  Let us take you in; we can help you.”  It wasn’t his most convincing performance; he was going for disinterested but landed shy of it, somewhere in ‘nervous’ territory.</p><p> </p><p>Mish gave another of their knife’s-edge laughs.</p><p> </p><p>“You don’t get it, do you?  You still think this is about you.  Honestly, the ego on this man,” Mish said, looking over their shoulder to include Bond in the conversation.  “But then, he always talked a better game than he could deliver.”</p><p> </p><p>There was a pause as Mish waited for them to ask the obvious question.  In this, at least, they hadn’t changed.  They were still a drama queen.</p><p> </p><p>Q had no intention of following Mish’s script, and he had patience honed by years of sitting thousands of miles away from his agents listening to them survive or die, often without the ability to do anything to change the outcome.</p><p> </p><p>For his part, Bond appeared utterly relaxed, which was, of course, a lethal deception.  Not for the first time—nor even the first hundredth—Q admired how exceptionally good Bond was at his job.</p><p> </p><p>Despite having one of the deadliest men in the world at their back, Mish didn’t seem fazed.  Q thought he might credit that to Mish’s obvious mania, but it was also just possible that their confidence was founded on knowing something Q and Bond did not.</p><p> </p><p>So, Q waited, taking a page from the world-class interrogators he’d had the honor of sharing a mission with for the better part of a decade.</p><p> </p><p>Mish’s sneer slipped into a smirk, which melted slowly off their face to be replaced with a flat look of loathing.</p><p> </p><p>Then Mish huffed, threw an exaggerated wink over their shoulder at Bond, and said, “You’re not the bait.  <em>I </em>am,” in the tone of voice typically reserved for nannies explaining to their charges why they couldn’t have another cookie.</p><p> </p><p>Q tried to puzzle through it without his expression changing, and he avoided looking at Bond, though he desperately wanted to gauge the agent’s reaction to Mish’s declaration.  Mish couldn’t have come in as a distraction for the penetration of a larger force; Bond’s many, well-placed traps and Q’s blanket of security prevented it.</p><p> </p><p>He supposed it was possible that Mish was themself a weapon, strapped with a bomb—somewhere on their spandex-clad body—or carrying a pathogen or neurotoxin, but that also seemed far-fetched, like something out of a movie.</p><p> </p><p>“God, you’re boringly stupid,” Mish said after a few more moments of silence.  “While the cat’s away,” they sing-songed, and Q finally looked to Bond, who gave a minute shake of his head in answer.</p><p> </p><p>If he couldn’t make sense of it, he’d have to brazen it out, so Q sucked in his lower lip, letting it out with a pop, before shrugging.</p><p> </p><p>“Nope, still don’t get it,” he said airily, brain frantically sifting through every bit of intel they’d gathered, trying to put the pieces together.</p><p> </p><p>“This was never about <em>you</em>,” Mish repeated.  They were staring at the Dorian laptop.</p><p> </p><p>Dorian, whose hacking expertise had brought Q to the attention of M.</p><p> </p><p>M, who’d taken a chance on a scared, angry, lost young man whose friends had all been murdered.</p><p> </p><p>Except one of them hadn’t.</p><p> </p><p>One of them was standing in front of him staring at the last piece of hardware Dorian owned.</p><p> </p><p>“What—” Q started to say, but he caught an aborted motion from Bond, and he stopped himself.</p><p> </p><p>It was coming together now, a cold, annihilating horror racing over him like a wave, and Q held onto his expression of mild confusion, bit his lower lip like he was struggling to understand, let a shiver wash through him to his toes as Mish giggled and stamped their feet like a spoiled kid who’d finally gotten their way.</p><p> </p><p>It wasn’t possible.  Q wanted to say the words aloud just to reassure himself, as if they were an incantation against reality.<br/>
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</p><p><br/>
It wasn’t possible that Mish had planted something on Dorian’s laptop, that the Mish he’d known could have gained access to it and left a door open a crack, not without Dorian then—and more especially Q now—noticing.</p><p> </p><p>That would mean that Mish had been playing a longer game than Q had imagined, and that was…</p><p> </p><p>“Impossible,” he said at last, shaking his head, mouth set in a grim line.  “There’s no way you could have hacked my laptop, not now, and certainly not then.”</p><p> </p><p>“What would you like to bet?” Mish asked, voice thick with gloating challenge.</p><p> </p><p>Q ignored them, locking eyes with Bond.  “It’s impossible,” he said, willing Bond to understand what he <em>wasn’t</em> saying—that even had Mish been that good, Q had always been better; that even blinded by how much he’d loved and desperately needed Mish back then, he wouldn’t have been so stupid.</p><p> </p><p>He knew what he was asking Bond—to have faith in a person he’d never met, the lonely, sad, misguided young man who’d gotten his best friends killed.</p><p> </p><p>“Of course, it is,” Bond said, smooth, cool voice a balm for Q’s racing heart.  “She never made mistakes where people like us were concerned.”</p><p> </p><p><em>People like us</em>.</p><p> </p><p>But M had made mistakes with her people, of course—Silva was the glaring exception that might charitably be said to prove the rule.</p><p> </p><p>The rule that meant she hadn’t made a mistake with Q.<br/>
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</p><p>“Nor do I,” Bond added, as if Mish weren’t standing between them with a frustrated villainous monologue behind their clenched white teeth.</p><p> </p><p>That was Bond, then, throwing in with Q, letting it all ride on him. </p><p> </p><p>Q’s eyes met and held Mish’s.</p><p> </p><p>“You were never that good, Mish,” Q said, almost gently, but with steel beneath it.</p><p> </p><p>As Q had predicted, the pity set Mish off.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re pathetic,” Mish spat.  Their eyes were dark, affectless, more shark-like even than Bond’s on his deadliest day—utterly devoid of intention beyond appetite.  “You think because you were taken in like a stray dog that they care about you?  That he <em>loves</em> you?  He fucks you.  There’s a difference, and I should know—all those times you’d cry out my name, ‘Oh, Mish, oh god, Mish,’” they mocked in falsetto.</p><p> </p><p>“Revolting,” Mish said, and now there was something in their eyes, a burning abhorrence, and Q felt the ground shifting beneath his feet, felt lightheaded, detached from the world around him.</p><p> </p><p>He was certain—utterly, completely certain—that Mish hadn’t compromised the Dorian laptop, that what they’d had between them all those lost years ago was real.</p><p> </p><p>He was certain, but…</p><p> </p><p> Mish’s face lit up with awful glee, proud of themself, “I never let on, did I?  I let you go on doing what you wanted to me, just so I could get what I needed.”  Their voice dropped, “And I did.”</p><p> </p><p>Mish lunged for the laptop, and Q threw himself in front of it, realizing his error even as he’d made it, momentum carrying him within jabbing distance of Mish, whose knife was so sharp and thin-bladed that Q felt at first only a pinch and then, as he registered Bond’s warning shout, the pain, bright and scything and immediate.</p><p> </p><p>Pressing a hand to his side, Q ignored the sticky heat there, instead looking around to find where Mish had gone.</p><p> </p><p>The Dorian laptop was still on the table, though Q could see it was running a program he didn’t recognize.<br/>
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</p><p><br/>
Mish themself was on the far end of the breakfast counter, leading Bond on a slow, gloating pursuit around it.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was blocking the near end of the kitchen, keeping Mish from going out the door, his gun and eyes steady on Mish.</p><p><br/>
“Look at your boy,” Mish taunted.  “Bleeding out while you play with me.  Mmmm, we could have a good time,” Mish said, running a hand down their chest and abdomen, but it was a parody of sexual desire, and they were making no effort to hide that.</p><p> </p><p>Bond, for his part, maintained his stance, aim and eyes on Mish.</p><p> </p><p>“’m alright,” Q managed in a passable imitation of someone who wasn’t bleeding to death.</p><p> </p><p>“He’s got minutes,” Mish said, looking at their nails and sounding bored.</p><p> </p><p>“What do you want?” Bond asked.</p><p> </p><p>“They’ve already gotten it,” Q answered grimly, fingers leaving bloody prints on the keyboard as he tried to stop the scroll of code eating its way through the laptop’s security. </p><p> </p><p>Q had his arm pressed across his midriff, like he was holding his guts in, but he looked up defiantly at Mish.  “This was always about money,” he said, rather evenly, he thought, all things considered.</p><p> </p><p>Mish smirked.  “Everything is always about money, Kitty-Cat.  Alain knew that…at the end.”</p><p> </p><p>Q’s lips shaped the words of denial, but he made no sound.  It all made a sudden, terrifying sort of sense:  Rae had sworn up and down that she hadn’t done anything to lead Goliathan back to them, and now Q realized that she had been right.</p><p> </p><p>The guilt of being responsible for Alain’s death had been misplaced.  She’d killed herself for nothing.</p><p> </p><p>“You led them right to us,” Q said through clenched teeth.  Grey was creeping in at the edges of his vision, and the pain was growing harder to ignore, pulsing in time with his heart, which seemed to be throwing itself recklessly against the cage of his ribs.</p><p> </p><p>Mish sneered and then shrugged, raising an eyebrow at Bond.  “Your fuckboy is dying.  You can let me by, as I’ve already succeeded in doing what I came here to do, or you can stand there like the pretty, useless thing you are and let him die.  Your choice.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond shot them.</p><p> </p><p>Q gasped Bond’s name, and then he was there, helping Q onto the couch, tearing at his shirt to get a look at the wound, and applying firm pressure with one hand while Q groaned and fell back against the couch cushions.</p><p> </p><p>With his other hand, Bond plugged three shots into the Dorian laptop.  A thin column of acrid grey smoke wheezed from the dying computer, and then the fractured screen went blank and dead.</p><p> </p><p>Q tried to say, “Mole?” but nothing came out, and then the earth spun out from beneath him, and he disappeared.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Home Ground</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When he came to, he was still on the couch, though in a less undignified sprawl, but the hand on his wound didn’t belong to Bond.  There was a serious-faced woman with a dark grey bob bent over him and an angular, serious-faced young man crouched beside her, watching.</p><p> </p><p>He could hear Bond’s low murmur from somewhere near the kitchen, but he couldn’t tell what he was saying.</p><p> </p><p>He hissed as pain lanced through him, and the woman looked up.</p><p> </p><p>“Well, there you are.  Alright, sir?”</p><p> </p><p>Q wondered what her standard scale for “alright” was if he were an example of it, but he nodded, throat dry, and managed, “Bond?”</p><p> </p><p>Bond appeared at his side with the back of the couch between them.  His smile was professional, confident, and Q knew it for the lie it was.</p><p> </p><p>“He’ll live, I take it,” Bond said lightly, and the young man snorted as he rose to his full height, shaking his head. </p><p> </p><p>“I’ll never get used to you lot.”</p><p> </p><p>Then he was gone from Q’s range of vision, and a moment later, Q heard the door.</p><p> </p><p>He searched Bond’s face for some clue of what had transpired, and Bond shook his head minutely and mouthed, “Later.”</p><p> </p><p>Then a groan from the kitchen area drew Bond’s attention even as the woman said, “All done,” briskly and rose to her feet.</p><p> </p><p>“Oof.  Too old for this nonsense, Jamie,” she said, and Q wished he could see Bond’s face at that.</p><p> </p><p>The warmth in Bond’s answer was unmistakable: “You’re a wonder, Molls.  Thank you.”</p><p> </p><p>He heard the sound of a friendly kiss and then a light smack, likely delivered by the woman, before she chortled and said, “Get on with you,” and exited, Q presumed, judging by the sound of the door once more closing.</p><p> </p><p>A heavy silence followed, broken by another groan.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
Bond took Molls’ place at Q’s side and stroked his fingers lightly over Q’s forehead.  “We can trust them,” he said.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Q nodded, too dry-throated to speak, and a glass appeared in Bond’s hand like a magic trick.</p><p> </p><p>“What happened?” Q asked.  “How long have I been out?”</p><p> </p><p>“Almost two hours.  It was touch and go there for a bit.  You scared me,” Bond answered, tracing his fingers over Q’s cheek.</p><p> </p><p>“Mish is on the kitchen floor.  Molls says they’ll live, more’s the pity.  I extracted intel from them while she and Robbie were putting you back together.  I’ve already called ‘home’.”</p><p> </p><p>“Who was it?” Q asked.</p><p> </p><p>“Delilah Sturbridge,” Bond answered, adding, “She was a senior analyst in the cyberterrorism division.”</p><p> </p><p>“Was?” Q latched onto the important word in that sentence.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s answering nod was tight.</p><p> </p><p>“Found dead in her flat a couple of hours ago, according to Moneypenny.  She’d been dead for 36 hours or so.”</p><p> </p><p>Q took that in, struggling against the fog of fatigue and blood loss.  Nothing was making sense.  A shiver wracked him, and he swallowed convulsively as his stomach roiled.</p><p> </p><p>“Later,” Bond promised, “You need to rest.”  He leaned over to ghost a kiss across Q’s lips.  Bond’s touch felt like an inferno, and Q shivered again, harder.</p><p> </p><p>Bond swore viciously, a low, steady stream of invective, and disappeared, returning moments later with the duvet from their bed, tucking it around Q and saying, “Watch the IV,” which was when Q realized he was hooked to a bag that was slowly replenishing his blood supply.</p><p> </p><p>“Sleep, love,” Bond whispered, kiss lingering this time.</p><p> </p><p>He didn’t want to sleep, to leave Bond alone with a wounded Mish, to spiral down again into unconsciousness, but while his spirit was willing to stand at Bond’s shoulder for the last of it, his flesh was too, too weak.</p><p> </p><p>Q closed his eyes and let himself fall again, trusting Bond to keep him safe while he lingered in the swaddling darkness.</p><p> </p><p>When he awoke a second time, the flat was dim, only a single light from somewhere behind him casting a faint glow over the couch.  He turned his head carefully to find Bond dozing in a chair that he’d pulled up next to the couch.</p><p> </p><p>His bladder made itself known, and Q tried to push himself upright, forgetting about the IV line until a sharp pinch on the back of his hand reminded him.</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck,” he whispered, extricating the IV line from where it had become tangled in the duvet.</p><p> </p><p>Before he could put his legs over the side, Bond was there, saying, “Where do you think you’re going?”</p><p> </p><p>Mouth desert-dry, Q gave him a speaking look instead, and it must have been enough even in the dim light, because Bond sighed and put a hand under his arm and helped him—carefully—to his feet.</p><p> </p><p>His body didn’t think that was a great idea, judging from the insistent, thrumming pain in his side, and his brain was even less on board with it as the room began to dip and sway around him.</p><p> </p><p>Gripping Bond’s forearm, Q closed his eyes and tried to get the floor to stop heaving.  When it did, he took a deep breath and said, “Okay,” in a voice that didn’t sound anything like him.</p><p> </p><p>Necessities (and the attendant humiliation) taken care of, Bond escorted him back to the couch, where he was grateful to be gently deposited, as if his bones were made of glass and he might shatter at any rough handling.</p><p> </p><p>“Where are they?” Q asked when he’d gotten his breath back.  The ache in his side had diminished to a dullish throbbing, aided by a paracetamol administered with the usual cautions by Bond.</p><p> </p><p>“The blue guest room,” Bond answered.  “I thought you might want to talk to them before I took them in.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s finished, then?” </p><p> </p><p>Bond raised an eyebrow.  “You think there were more than Mish and Sturbridge?”</p><p> </p><p>“If this was about money, then someone was paying them.”</p><p> </p><p>“And that’s why I’m going to deliver Mish into the gentle ministrations of some of the world’s most efficient interrogators,” Bond answered, a dark, satisfied promise in his voice.</p><p> </p><p>“Let me,” Q said before he realized he was going to offer.</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”  Bond could be forgiven for his skepticism, Q knew, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt to hear it.</p><p> </p><p>“They’ll tell me,” Q answered with more confidence than he actually felt.</p><p> </p><p>“They’ll tell you whatever’s calculated to hurt you the most.”  Bond took Q’s hand and brought it to his mouth, kissing his knuckles one at a time.  It was a tender, intimate gesture, and it seemed so at odds with what they were discussing that Q felt for a moment like he was dreaming.</p><p> </p><p>“They’ve hurt you enough,” Bond continued, still holding Q’s hand. </p><p> </p><p>“They can’t hurt me anymore.”  Q turned his fingers over in Bond’s grip, so he could squeeze his hand in reassurance.  “They have no hold over me.  And you’re here,” he added.</p><p> </p><p>“Besides,” he went on, voice now cool and hard, “Mish wanting to hurt me is what I’m counting on.  They’re more likely to let something slip if they think this is their last chance to destroy me.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond nodded, though his expression was tight and unhappy.  “Alright.”</p><p> </p><p>Q didn’t need Bond’s permission, of course, but he would need his assistance to get to the guest room at the far end of the Foundry.</p><p><br/>
“I’ll bring them to you,” Bond said, anticipating Q’s need.  He was three steps away when he paused and looked back.  “Say the word and I’ll kill them.”</p><p> </p><p>Q nodded and worked up a smile, wan though it was.  “I know you will.  That’s one of the many reasons I love you.”</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s return smile was somehow both wolfish and fond, and Q wished Mish were already gone, so he could let Bond take him to bed to sleep for a week and then fuck for another.</p><p> </p><p>Hissing with the effort, Q pulled himself upright and took a few long, steadying breaths.  As he heard Bond approaching with their prisoner, Q swallowed to clear his throat of a sudden obstruction and ruthlessly quashed the queasy roil of his stomach.</p><p> </p><p>When he met Mish’s bruised eyes across the space separating them, Q was surprised to discover that he felt nothing—not revulsion nor regret, no anger nor disgust.</p><p> </p><p>There was a blank spot at his core where Mish used to live.</p><p> </p><p>Mish’s left thigh was wrapped with a towel that had once been sage green but was now a-bloom with irregular red circles of blood.  Their hands were bound behind them, and they’d obviously taken a few heavy blows to the face in addition to the gunshot wound.</p><p> </p><p>Q threw a look at Bond, who shrugged, wholly unrepentant, and said, “They came up off the floor fighting.”</p><p> </p><p>Mish’s sneer was a pale imitation of his earlier supreme confidence.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re going to tell me who paid you,” Q began, sparing them any preamble.</p><p> </p><p>“Why should I?”  There wasn’t much fight left in their voice; they sounded like the end of their rope was fraying.</p><p> </p><p>Q shrugged.  “Why <em>wouldn’t</em> you is the better question.  Whomever your employer is, they aren’t going to swoop in and rescue you from whatever black site we take you to—no one’s that valuable—nor will they have access to kill you there and put you out of their misery.  You make a deal with us and you’ll live in better conditions than if you didn’t.  Fail to make a deal, we’ll wring every ounce of information out of you anyway and then throw you in an extremely unpleasant hole for the rest of your life.”</p><p> </p><p>“You forgot an option,” Mish said, reviving somewhat.</p><p> </p><p>Q didn’t dignify his bait by snapping at it but simply waited.  He wasn’t the one bound and bleeding, after all.</p><p> </p><p>“I could die,” Mish explained, clenching their jaw and grimacing with apparent effort.</p><p> </p><p>Behind him, Bond, who’d remained theretofore watchful but silent, laughed.  It was a grim sound, mocking and cold, and Mish froze, horror washing over their face as they realized their planned last resort was no longer available.</p><p> </p><p>“We know our business, Mish,” Q said, smirking, happily sharing the credit that really belonged only to Bond; he’d only guessed what Bond must have done while Mish was unconscious. </p><p> </p><p>He did some further guessing: “Analysis of the capsule and false tooth should narrow our search for your employer considerably.  As you can see, then, you’re almost out of time.  Tell us the whole story or suffer a worse fate.” </p><p> </p><p>Q shrugged as if it was all the same to him what Mish chose—and it wasn’t an act at all.  He was sore and tired and wanted nothing more than to be alone again in the Foundry, curled against Bond in their bed.</p><p> </p><p>There were another few tedious minutes of grandstanding, but Mish eventually caved, as Q knew they would, and named an oligarch from a former Soviet bloc nation whose legitimate server farms were a front for an illegitimate crew of hackers whose specialty was hijacking crypto-currencies.</p><p> </p><p>The only real surprise in Mish’s revelations was that they’d come to the attention of this oligarch at all.</p><p> </p><p>“And here I thought Volkov had higher standards,” Bond said, the derision lush in his smooth, dark voice.</p><p> </p><p>Q, who’d been looking at Mish, saw a reaction flit across their face.  Sudden understanding painted an icy stripe down his spine.</p><p> </p><p>“Volkov didn’t recruit you,” he said, watching Mish to verify his suspicion.  “He thought he was getting me—Dorian.”  It wasn’t a question, and Q knew he was right when Mish’s lips flattened into a tight, unhappy line.</p><p> </p><p>“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Bond said with a particularly saturnine smirk.</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve never done anything original in your life,” Q marveled, shaking his head.  He thought he should be feeling something—pity, at least, for Mish was certainly pathetic.  They looked young and lost, stripped of their defenses, of their very identity.  They were a sad and sorry sight.</p><p> </p><p>But Q couldn’t work up any feeling beyond weariness.  He was tired to his marrow.</p><p> </p><p>He met Bond’s eyes over Mish’s shoulder, and Bond said, “Twenty minutes,” reading Q’s mind.  That was when the prearranged transport would arrive at the hand-off site.</p><p> </p><p>Bond stepped up behind Mish and took their elbow.  “We should go.”</p><p> </p><p>Something in Mish revived, a kind of desperate, vicious life, and they shook off Bond’s grip to say, “Don’t you want to know why?”</p><p> </p><p>Q shrugged again, philosophically, and shook his head.  “I already know why:  Because you’re a scared, scarred, selfish little person who never cared about anyone but themselves.”</p><p> </p><p>The best thing about Q’s words wasn’t the froth-lipped, vicious spew of invective that it earned but the solid weight of certainty as Q realized he believed them:  Rae and Alain hadn’t died because Q had led them into a dangerous underworld.  Mish’s life hadn’t been destroyed because Q had taken the lifeline M had thrown.</p><p> </p><p>What portion of blame was his he could live with, and the rest fell squarely on the slumping shoulders of the person Bond was even at that moment leading out of Q’s life forever.</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t be long,” Q called out, and Bond gifted him with a warm curl of his lips before he closed the door between them and was gone.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Home at Last</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Q wouldn’t have considered himself the domesticated type.</p><p> </p><p>His idea of householding ran to take-away menus and tea fixings.  His apartment had a gentle sort of squalor, busy with half-done projects and whatever passion had taken him most recently.</p><p> </p><p>Now, he found himself in the sunny, bright kitchen of a little cottage in the Cotswolds making—<em>attempting</em> to make—lunch.</p><p> </p><p>It had seemed like a good idea at the time.  Checking his messages and his laptop repeatedly had done nothing to resolve his nervousness; staring out the window didn’t bring resolution to his feelings any more quickly.</p><p> </p><p>But maybe throwing together a nice pot of potato-leek soup wasn’t the brightest idea Q had ever had.  The counter area was a chaos of mangled produce and spilled spices, puddles of vegetable stock and piles of potato peels.</p><p> </p><p>His hands were sticky with starch, his eyes a little watery from the onion he’d been slicing when he heard the front door open.</p><p> </p><p>There was a static pause as all the air was sucked out of the room.  Then Bond’s voice, low and sure, said, “I’m home,” and he appeared in the doorway from the tiny front hall.</p><p> </p><p>He looked tired, the bright sunlight of the kitchen bringing out the shadows under his eyes and the lines around his mouth.</p><p> </p><p>Q couldn’t rinse his hands fast enough and was still drying them when he met Bond in front of the refrigerator, wrapped his arms around him, and drew him into a long, slow, I-remember-you sort of kiss.</p><p> </p><p>The sharp edge of the kitchen counter was digging into his lower back, a discomfort he was ignoring for the pleasure of feeling Bond’s hard body against him, when he smelled something burning and remembered that he’d been browning onions.</p><p> </p><p>“Fuck!” he said, and Bond murmured, “Please,” but also stepped back with a fond smirk on his face as Q squirmed away to take the pan—now smoking—off the hob.</p><p> </p><p>Bond let him get to the sink to submerge the pan before he was up against Q’s back, whispering, “You smell like leeks,” into his ear in the richest, most lascivious tone Q had ever heard.</p><p> </p><p>He dropped the pan, splashing them both with suds, and said, “Really, Bond?  Leeks?”</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s unfettered laugh sparked a fluttering behind Q’s breastbone, and he turned in the loose circle of Bond’s arms to steal a kiss from his laughing mouth.</p><p> </p><p>“Are you terribly hungry?” Bond asked, sounding not in the least bit sincere in his concern.</p><p> </p><p>Q bit his lower lip.  “Well, there’s one thing I’d like to put in my mouth.”</p><p> </p><p>That earned him another laugh, and god but Q would spend his life teasing that noise out of Bond if they had but world enough and time.</p><p> </p><p>The shadow of the last few weeks cast itself over them briefly, Q remembering a bleeding, listless, manic-eyed Mish being led from the Foundry; recalling Bond’s sad, tired voice over the line explaining Mish’s additional perfidies revealed by further interrogation; and finally his rough-voiced, exhausted recounting of the mission against Volkov, which had been a success, though not without some personal cost.</p><p> </p><p>Q had spent the time working remotely from his apartment in London and fending off Moneypenny’s increasingly irritated emails about him not taking proper care of himself, post-stabbing.</p><p> </p><p>All of the long days of worry and waiting and pain faded to nothing, then.</p><p> </p><p>Q led Bond to the bedroom and released his hand only long enough to draw the blinds and turn on the shower to let it run hot.</p><p> </p><p>When he came back to the room, Bond was shirtless and working his belt open, a task Q was happy to take off his hands.  Wordlessly, he stripped Bond, gratified at the catch in Bond’s breathing when he knelt to help him slip off his shoes and socks.</p><p> </p><p>When he stood back up, he let his hands trail up Bond’s thighs and over his hips, settling comfortably at his waist, and then he waited until Bond’s hot gaze was on him before he lowered his mouth to the red, puckered scar that Bond had earned bringing the last chapter of Mish’s story to a close.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s hand came up to cup the back of Q’s neck, and he breathed his name—his real name—almost reverently, holding Q’s mouth against the spot scant centimeters from Bond’s heart, which Q could feel pounding through his skin and muscle and bone.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was naked and half-hard, his hand shaking a little as he brought it up to gently tilt Q’s chin and urge him upright and out of his clothes, which was the work of a minute, and then Q led Bond into the bathroom, past the mirror already occluded by steam, into the walk-in shower with its twin massage heads, both turned to the same spot, where they could stand under the insistent spray and touch and kiss, open-mouthed, both of them shaking now, subtle tremors betraying their desire and Q’s relief to have Bond back with him, whole and safe, not struggling to suck in breath in some grim, eastern European back alley.</p><p> </p><p>Q’s soap-slick fingers were wrapped around Bond’s cock, stroking him slowly as he sucked a love-mark into Bond’s neck and Bond murmured filthy suggestions into his ear, chasing his words with his hot tongue, making Q moan and shiver.</p><p> </p><p>His own cock was pressed into the vee of Bond’s pelvis as he worked his hips in slow, easy thrusts against Bond’s hard abdomen.</p><p> </p><p>He could come like this, skin to skin, wet and hot, knees quaking as the pleasure built, but Bond said, “Not here,” and Q would deny him nothing, having again survived what should have killed him. He let himself be led out of the shower, toweled dry, and guided to the bed, where Bond stretched out against him, knee between Q’s thighs, and said, “Fuck me,” like he wasn’t sure of Q’s answer.</p><p> </p><p>Q struggled to put the words together in some semblance of sense.  It wasn’t that he had never imagined them making love, but it hadn’t occurred to Q that Bond would be open to that; given some of his personal history…</p><p> </p><p>Q realized he’d been quiet too long and pulled his gaze back from the middle distance to see that</p><p>Bond’s eyes were steady on Q’s face.  Q felt stripped bare, laid open to his core as Bond waited patiently for Q’s response, traces of uncertainty and hope evident in his expression.</p><p> </p><p>“Yes,” Q answered on a breathy laugh, like a giddy teenager, and then, “Please,” to make it clear how desperate he suddenly was to discover what it would feel like to push inside of Bond and feel him yielding his control.</p><p> </p><p>Of course, Bond was prepared.  There was a lovely, citrus-scented oil and low light casting stripes of shadow across Bond’s twitching stomach as Q spread his legs and knelt between them, sucking a nipple into his mouth as he slid a finger inside, hearing Bond’s breath catch at the sensation, feeling him shiver under his touch.</p><p> </p><p>Bond threaded his fingers through Q’s hair, touching, not holding, and lifted his hips to give Q easier access.  His finger slid in all the way, and he crooked it, punching a curse out of Bond, whose hips stuttered as Q did it again and then a third time, Bond saying, “S-stop,” and Q leaving off tormenting him in favor of pushing in a second finger.</p><p> </p><p>A few minutes later, Bond was thrashing and swearing, Q’s three fingers buried deep, his free hand spread low on Bond’s abdomen, Bond’s cock occasionally brushing damply through the hairs on the back of his hand.</p><p> </p><p>Q pulled his fingers out carefully, poured more oil into his hand to slick himself, sensation almost too much against his aching cock.</p><p> </p><p>“God, I want you,” he said, looking up the length of Bond’s body to see those cool blue eyes fastened hot and wanting on Q’s flushed face.</p><p> </p><p>“Gorgeous, please,” Bond growled, bumping his hips up to drive home his plea, and Q hooked one of Bond’s ankles up over his shoulder and lined himself up.</p><p> </p><p>Bond blew out a breath, let his head drop to the pillow, and raised his other knee as Q bumped against that tight furl and pressed his cock inward in one long, slow, steady push that drove a stream of curses and nonsense and love words out of Bond until Q was flush against his arse, fully sheathed, chest heaving as he held himself back, waiting.</p><p><br/>
Bond felt impossibly good, hot and tight and alive around him, and Q swore he could feel the echo of Bond’s heartbeat inside of him, where he was wrapped around Q’s cock.  It was overwhelming, the love he felt, like Bond had a hand around his heart, holding it as Q held still, waiting.</p><p> </p><p>He held his breath, too, feeling his own pleasure building low in his belly and in a hot ball at the base of his spine.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s jaw was clenched, and from his position, Q couldn’t tell if it were pleasure or pain or some combination on his face, but when he opened his eyes and fixed them on Q, they were bright with urgency and need and love.</p><p> </p><p>“Please,” he said again, and Q let himself go, pulling back out until the wide head of his cock teased the inside ring of muscle. </p><p> </p><p>Bond’s emphatic, “Fuck!” was motivating, and Q thrust back in harder, swiveling his hips, wrenching a shout out of Bond as he struck the right spot. </p><p> </p><p>He wasn’t going to last.  The hot clench of Bond around him, the intense rightness of it, and the way Bond was panting and saying his name, clutching his biceps with one hand while the other gripped the sheets—Q’s hips pistoned urgently, Bond’s name spilling from teeth clenched in an effort to bring Bond over before he came himself.</p><p> </p><p>“Q!” Bond groaned, and Q felt molten pleasure spreading through him, melting his control.  He let go of Bond’s knee so he could wrap his hand around Bond’s cock, pulling him once, twice, firm and fast, and Bond cried, “God, Q!” and came, Q following seconds later, his whole body shaking with the force of it.</p><p> </p><p>Bond was shaking, too, mouth open on a quiet sound as Q slipped from his body and collapsed, one leg slung over his, arm across his chest, where Q could feel Bond’s great heart drumming all along his forearm.</p><p> </p><p>He drifted in a directionless haze, muscles fluttering, breath still catching, and was utterly content to feel Bond alive under his touch.</p><p> </p><p>He must have fallen into a doze because the light caress of Bond’s fingertips through his hair startled him, and he raised his head to find Bond looking back at him with an expression that said all the things they never used words for.</p><p> </p><p>He dropped a kiss on the puckered scar and pulled himself up, so he could whisper, “I love you,” in Bond’s ear and hear the words echoed back in Bond’s beautiful growl, his breath warm and damp against Q’s neck.</p><p> </p><p>Later, in the shower, Q asked, “Why now?” and Bond didn’t pretend to misunderstand.</p><p> </p><p>He shrugged, his eyes going distant, into a past Q didn’t share or a future he hoped to, and when he came back to Q again, he said only, “You needed it.  We both did.”</p><p> </p><p>“I’ll always need you,” Q answered, and it must have been the right thing to say, because Bond crowded him into the corner of the shower, out of the immediate pulse of the spray, and kissed him breathless before eeling by him out of the shower, where he toweled off swiftly and said, “Don’t go far.”</p><p> </p><p>As if he would even if he could.</p><p> </p><p>It was a good thing their immediate enemies had been so thoroughly vanquished because Q seemed to have lost command of most of his muscles.  His knees still felt watery when he stepped out of the shower, and a liquid languor pooled in his wrists and shoulders, loosening his spine.</p><p> </p><p>He wanted to crawl into bed, naked and damp, and wrap himself around Bond until they both fell asleep.</p><p> </p><p>But Bond wasn’t in the bedroom when Q emerged, so he pulled on the plush, wine-colored robe Bond had given him and padded out to the kitchen, where the sight of Bond in an open blue dress shirt and loose black lounge pants, blue-veined feet bare on the terracotta tiles of the floor, stopped him.</p><p> </p><p>The feast laid out on the modest breakfast counter was a distant second in beauty to James Bond wearing the easy smile of a man who had just been thoroughly fucked by his lover.</p><p> </p><p>“Since we didn’t have lunch,” Bond offered, and Q laughed, surprised to discover it was still day, the late afternoon sun streaming through the narrow windows of the door at the front of the cottage.</p><p> </p><p>There was sliced sourdough rosemary baguette and soft, rich brie; grapes and apples with almost translucent slices of sharp white cheddar; strawberries and cream and scones with jam.   There was a steaming pot of tea, of course, and two crystal glasses reflecting the peaty gold of a bottle of the finest Highlands Scotch, the one loss Bond had most loudly lamented when their little hideaway had been destroyed.</p><p> </p><p>“This is lovely,” Q said, sliding onto a stool and picking up a strawberry to dip into the cream.  “But how did you manage it?  I didn’t have half of these things brought in.”</p><p> </p><p>“It’s one of the many advantages,” Bond enunciated as he stepped up behind Q and touched his lips to his ear, “of fucking a spy.” </p><p> </p><p>Q laughed again and almost snorted cream into his tea, which Bond was pouring with the wickedest smile Q had ever seen on his face.</p><p> </p><p>“I like hearing you laugh,” Bond said, moving to his own stool, across the counter from Q.</p><p> </p><p>“I have a feeling I’ll be doing it more often,” Q answered, knowing that he was grinning like a total fool, feeling his cheeks heat at his obvious adoration of Bond and not caring in the least.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s mouth softened into a pleased smile and he hummed—a little, contented noise in the back of his throat.</p><p> </p><p>Q wanted to lick the brie from Bond’s teeth and take him right back to bed, but he controlled himself—barely—and let Bond feed him another strawberry dripping with thick, sweet cream.</p><p> </p><p>“I love you,” Q said a few quiet minutes later, as they picked through the remains of the meal.  He was holding a cup of tea, watching Bond sip at his glass of Scotch, and letting himself hope, like a mad fool, that they might have dozens, maybe scores of these quiet, happy domestic moments in their lives together.</p><p> </p><p>Bond’s serious eyes met Q’s over the rim of his glass, and he swallowed with obvious enjoyment before setting the glass down.</p><p> </p><p>He reached over the counter to take Q’s hand, rubbing his knuckles lightly, pausing where a ring might be worn if they were different men living ordinary lives.</p><p> </p><p>“I can’t promise you forever,” Bond said, his voice rough with things unsaid.  “But I can give you what time I have left.  It won’t be enough.” </p><p> </p><p>Q swallowed sympathetically at the tightness in Bond’s throat, a bittersweet agony pressing against his heart.</p><p> </p><p>“It could never be enough,” Q answered softly, turning his hand palm-up and lacing his fingers through Bond’s.  “But I will take whatever you have to give me, James, selfishly and greedily and for as long as you’ll give it.”</p><p> </p><p>“There will still be…” Bond started, a sudden tightening at the corners of his mouth anticipating the painful words to follow.</p><p><br/>
Q squeezed his hand and said, “I know, love.  It’s alright.”</p><p> </p><p>“And you won’t come to resent me for being Her Majesty’s whore?”  There was no self-pity in the question, and Bond’s eyes, clear and direct, watched Q’s face for his reaction.</p><p> </p><p>Q shook his head.  “You’re no one’s whore, James.  But I hope, at least at home, that you’ll be my husband?”</p><p> </p><p>Q had spent the weeks of Bond’s convalescence considering what value the span of years ahead of him would have without Bond in them, and he hadn’t liked what he’d foreseen.  While he’d had no concrete plan to make such a declaration, the moment the words left his mouth, Q knew they were right in some fundamental and unalterable way.</p><p> </p><p>“Trying to make an honest man of me?” Bond murmured, sliding off his stool and coming around the counter to edge between Q’s thighs where he’d turned in his seat to meet Bond head-on.</p><p>“We’re as honest as our jobs can let us be, I think,” Q noted dryly as Bond pulled him closer to the edge of the stool, so he could feel how happy Bond was.  “And anyway, we don’t lie to each other.”</p><p> </p><p>Thankfully, the ‘anymore’ went without saying.</p><p> </p><p>Wrapping his arms around Bond’s neck, Q closed the distance between them to take Bond’s lower lip in his teeth and press down, just hard enough to draw a soft, low sound out of Bond.</p><p> </p><p>“So, Commander James Bond, will you do me the honor of becoming my husband?” Q asked.</p><p> </p><p>This close, he could see the flecks of sea-blue and lapis in Bond’s beautiful eyes and couldn’t believe there was ever a time he’d found them cold.</p><p> </p><p>Now, they were alive with warmth and affection and a steady flame of love that robbed Q of breath and voice.</p><p> </p><p>It was a good thing, then, that it was Bond’s turn to speak.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
“Yes,” he said simply, kissing Q at first softly and then with growing intent, his mouth, his powerful body, his whole being answering Q at once, definitively.</p><p> </p><p>Breathless with joy, speechless with it, Q kissed Bond again, a passionate plighting of troth.</p><p> </p><p>“I love you,” they said together, then laughed, giddy and bright and foolish with hope for tomorrow and the next day and all the days to come after that.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>MAJOR SPOILER:</p><p>When I began writing this story, Mish was Q's dead One True Love and was genderqueer.  When I realized partway through the story that Mish was actually alive and the villain of the piece, I had a choice to make.  Did I want to fundamentally change the Mish Q had fallen in love with by changing their gender, so they weren't non-binary?  Or was I going to allow a genderqueer character to be the villain?  Could I do the latter without indulging in stereotypes or harmful tropes?  Was it okay for Mish to be the antagonist?</p><p>I don't know.</p><p>That's my answer:  I don't know.  I'm queer myself, but that doesn't make me an arbiter or expert.  It doesn't mean I get to speak for all queer folk.  </p><p>The Mish I "met" when they danced into my head beneath the disco ball in the Foundry is a person I felt was worth getting to know, even the bad parts.  I hope you feel the same, but I'll understand if you do not.</p><p>The amazingly talented and generous @choutarouootori on tumblr made <a href="https://doubleohseven.tumblr.com/post/623033612276842496/007-fest-31-days-of-fic-recs-day-4"> A gorgeous gifset for "Homemaking"</a>  If you check her stuff out, please let her know how awesome she is!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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